Video clips for Microsoft Powerpoint Presentations

I recently needed to create a short presentation that would run on its own and include narration, various clip art, standard bullet points and a video clip on one slide that made a key point. I created the video on a Mac with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects so my first choice was to export it as Quicktime. This worked great for presenting from my Mac but when I went to test it on Windows, even with Quicktime Player installed, I got the bouncing line visual with the audio instead of my video.

But wait, Powerpoint can export to a “movie”, right? Why not just save the whole thing as a movie and be done with it? Well, it looks like Powerpoint’s movies don’t include audio narration. Maybe it can be done but mine didn’t work. I would’ve fought harder to make this work but this assignment technically was supposed to be delivered as a Powerpoint file so it wasn’t worth the work.

The solution turned out to be MPEG4. I exported media from Premiere Pro in MP4 format and it worked as embedded video on the slide on both platforms. If you are going to include video on slides in your presentations, save some time and start with this format.