Creating Animated Simulations for Presentations

Power Point (2000) only works well with AVI movies compressed using either "Microsoft Video 1" or "RLE" encoding. Mpeg, gif and other formats have choppy playback or wont work at all in Power Point. Unfortunately there are no unix utilities that encode in this format.

I have had luck creating Power Point 2000 - suitable AVI's with:

• ​Gif Movie Gear

and

• ​Fast Movie Processor

Gif Movie Gear seems to be currently supported but is NOT free. Fast Movie Compressor appears to be abandoned share ware but I like it better because its free (for non commercial use).

At the date of this writing (4/6/07), both of these tools crash on Windows Vista during AVI compression using either RLE8 or Microsoft Video 1 encoders … the only formats that work well in Power Point. Though Windows versions ⇐ win XP work OK. Microsoft has adknoledged this as a ​Vista bug. MS has known about the AVI bug since October … still no fix.

Some anecdotal notes on video in Power Point presentations

• It would convenient if there was a way to do this on a *nix workstation. Do post to this page if you find a way to do this.
  • mencoder is installed on shell and should now be on clover as well. Just go to the directory with the image files and run

    mencoder mf://\density*.png -mf w=640:h=480:fps=7:type=png -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -oac copy -o density.avi
    

  • type is the input image format (png, jpeg, etc…)
  • w is width
  • h is height
  • fps is frames per second
  • and I wouldn't worry about anything else.
  Of course the codec is still mpeg4 but the container is AVI - whatever that means
• Perhaps newer versions of Power Point will accommodate easier formats to create? (Unix "convert" can produce mpeg files if mpeg2encode​ is installed on the machine.)

• Remember that Power Point video files are linked, not embedded into the power point file. Power point will look for the video file according to its path location. It is a good idea to keep your presentations and videos in the same root directory. If you must copy your presentation before showing it do copy the video files as well. Test the presentation to make sure the video paths are still working OK if you change directory names / move files around. This is a common problem that can ruin the presentation.

Using Fast Movie Compressor

It is important to choose an encoder setting that Power Point will accept and compression / color space settings that do not appreciably degrade the video quality. Here's how its done.

"RLE" encoding also plays smoothly in Power Point — but only supports 8-bit (256) colors. This example uses Microsoft Video encoding which works with any color depth. In this example I used 24-bit color.