Playing Camtasia Studio Video Content within PowerPoint

Up to now, we’ve talked exclusively about getting information from PowerPoint into Camtasia Studio. But what if you wanted to do the reverse? Say you have a wonderfully set up PowerPoint presentation and, during your presentation, you want to access some screen video content to show to your audience. What’s the best way of going about it?

If you’ve worked with PowerPoint for any length of time, you probably already know that PowerPoint supports the ability to place video content inside a slide within your presentation. I do not recommend this. Screen videos placed directly in the slide tend to look just awful as a result of PowerPoint automatically scaling the content in order to fit the slide frame. Inserting a video in this manner works fine for real-world content, but not so much for screen videos. Any text in the video is rendered practically illegible.

Linking to Camtasia Player

But there is a way to access videos directly within PowerPoint, and it has none of the aforementioned problems. In essence, it involves linking your presentation to your external AVI video file, which will then open in Camtasia Player. No scaling, no yucky quality.

Here’s how to set up PowerPoint to play videos using Camtasia Player:

1. Open PowerPoint, and navigate to the slide where you want the video to be displayed.

2. In order to call the video, we’re going to need some kind of button that, when clicked, will call up Camtasia Player and your video. One way to do this is to add an action button. From the Drawing toolbar (usually located at the bottom of your application window), click AutoShapes, and then choose a button from the Action Buttons submenu:

   

   or

   Choose an object on your slide to act as your button. It can be a text box, a graphic, in fact any object as long as it’s not grouped. Right-click on your object, and then choose Action Settings… from the context menu that appears.

3. On the Action Settings dialog box, click the Run program radio button. It’s time to link to our video file.

4. Enter Camplay.exe into the Run program field. Now PowerPoint needs to know where to look for this file. You can browse for it, but to avoid accessibility issues later on in case the presentation file gets moved, it’s best to place a copy of both Camplay.exe and your video file directly in your project folder, so that they’re much more likely to stay with your project (and it simplifies the file path). The Camplay executable is only 476 KB. Just copy it over from your program directory. By default, it’s located here: C:\Program Files\TechSmith\Camtasia Studio 4\Camplay.exe.

5. Now we have to specify both the video file and how you want Camtasia Player to open it. On the same line in the Run program field, enter a space, any command line parameter options (completely optional), and then the file name (also technically optional, but who needs the player without the actual video?). For those who are wondering, command line parameters can help you stipulate exactly how you want the file opened and displayed. For example, if you want it to open in full-screen mode or loop the video until the user closes it, you can use command line parameters to accomplish this. For a comprehensive list of command line parameters, and for more information about the Camtasia Player in general, please see Chapter 15, “Other Output Options.”

   

   The commands and arguments in the Run program field are instructing the program to launch Camtasia Player, open myvideo.avi without a title bar, and automatically exit when finished.

6. So, by now we should have a dialog that looks roughly like the adjacent figure.

   Click OK to exit the dialog.

7. When running your slide show, simply click the chosen action button when you’re ready for the video to begin. Camtasia Player will launch your video using the parameters (if any) you specified. When finished, simply continue the presentation.

Note 

Opening Camtasia Player through PowerPoint in this way can sometimes make the security features of Microsoft Office a little grumpy. If you end up getting a security warning message that is disruptive to your presentation, you can temporarily lower PowerPoint’s security settings by clicking on the Tools menu, and from the Macro submenu, choosing Security…. Set the security level to low until your presentation is over, and then reset it to its original level.

Embedding Animated GIF Files

If you really want to embed a video into the actual presentation, there is one other option, provided the video’s dimensions are small and its length is short (under 20 seconds). You can convert your video into an animated GIF (done within Camtasia Studio), and then import this image into your presentation. As a truly embedded part of the file, you needn’t worry about broken links when moving your presentation file around, and GIF files actually add precious little to the overall file size. The only hitch is that you’re confined to 256 colors.

Here’s how to embed an animated GIF in your PowerPoint presentation:

1. In Camtasia Studio, produce your video as an animated GIF. We’ll go into detail about this process in Chapter 12, but in terms of PowerPoint, there’s only one additional thing you need to know. Since you’re probably only going to want the video to play once, during production you would there fore set this option in the Production Wizard by entering a 1 into the Play __time(s) field, like so:

   

   However, due to a glitch in PowerPoint 2003 and 2007, this number must be set to the number of times you want the video to play plus one, so you would most likely enter a 2 here. The rest of the default options should work fine.

2. Open PowerPoint, and navigate to the slide where you want to embed your new GIF image.

3. From the Insert menu, go to Picture, and then choose From file….

4. Navigate to your animated GIF file and choose Open. The image will appear on your PowerPoint slide. It will not be animated until you view it in Slide Show mode.

5. You can move or resize this image at will, with no major scaling issues. You may wish to experiment with scaling your GIF in order to get the best possible image quality for the screen resolution at which you’ll be presenting.