Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Using YouTube Video in PowerPoint

Last updated Oct 5, 2007.

If you've investigated the YouTube phenomenon you know that it is an amazing source for video content. As a PowerPoint presenter it is quite possible that you have salivated at the prospect of using some of this content in your presentations.

If you've used YouTube you know that uploading a file is simple. It accepts virtually any file format, converts and encodes it into its proprietary format (which is a Flash FLV movie file) and then posts it for you. You're supposed to link to the file which you can do, or embed the link and movie into your own web site or blog.

While there are downloadable tools and converters to enable you to reverse the process, and there are converters for Flash video (one of which we've covered in an update), probably the easiest way to accomplish the task is to use a tool we've covered here before, TechSmith's Camtasia Studio.

In the past we've used Camtasia to make a movie from PowerPoint, even using its newer feature of the presenter in a window.

In this scenario we'll do something a bit more basic — we'll set Camtasia's screen capture Recorder to capture a Fixed Region of our window.

In the Fixed Region dialog box, we will be able to click Select once we locate the video on YouTube.

With the video open in the web page, we can click Select and trace a box around the portion of the screen in which the video plays. We also want to make sure that we enable the audio capture in Camtasia to come directly from the computer so that the sound from the video is also captured.

We can click F9 to begin playing just before or just after we click the start arrow to launch the video in the browser. We watch the video as we capture it and click F10 to stop recording.

The Save Recording dialog box enables us to save the Camtasia project file which we'll be working with. If you don't like what you've captured you can simply delete the captured video (don't click Save) and begin again.

When the process results in a good take, use the Post-Save Options to either Edit my recording (or if you're sure it's fine, you can go directly to Produce my video in a shareable format).

The Camtasia Studio editor will open with your clip in the timeline where you can create a new start and end point if you want. When it's previewing the way you want, you click Produce video as to begin the Production Wizard.

While you can set a production profile in Camtasia, if you haven't you can also just choose either of the formats for PowerPoint that work best — AVI or WMV.

In the Video Size window of the wizard you should select the size of the actual video; don't let it be distorted by choosing a custom or standard size of video.

In the last phase of the wizard you can name your video and preview it again if you like. Bear in mind that it will go into a production folder in the destination you chose — so if you name it Youtube.AVI it will go into a folder called YouTube. That's because Camtasia also can create a web page for the video and it can save a properly coded HTML page as well.

Finally you can open PowerPoint and use the Insert > Movies and Sound > Sound from File command to insert the encoded AVI or WMV file into PowerPoint.

In this example I captured the YouTube controls and the mouse cursor, but you could easily crop those out when you set the area.

Don't forget that the YouTube controls won't work in PowerPoint; instead you will simply click the movie during your slide show to begin or pause its playback.

Of course if you have a live web connection during your presentation you could actually link to the web page and let it play from a PowerPoint hyperlink or load the web browser and toggle between it and the presentation.

But if you want the video under your complete control, as a file linked to your PowerPoint presentation that you can play whether or not you're online, using Camtasia to capture it from a region of the screen is a pretty neat trick.