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'Bout Computers A Better Way To Do Media
with PowerPoint I have great news for the PowerPoint community this month. If you use any kind of multimedia with your presentations, you know what a pain it can be to add the files to a presentation, let alone ensure that they will play when you move the presentation. Well, multimedia guru and PowerPoint MVP Austin Myers has come up with a solution for you: PFC Media! Austin, the creator of the Myers Multi-media tutorial and long-time expert on PPT and media has struggled with media just as much as the rest of us. Over the years he has created a series of tools that he uses to make media a little easier. He decided awhile ago to package the tools up under one interface and make it available for you and I to use. You can thank him later – right now, let me share the pluses and minuses of the tool! The typical way to install media When you go to insert media into a presentation file, you use Insert> Movies and Sounds, navigate to the piece and insert it. You then realize that you need to move the presentation or the media file, so you futz around moving the media file to the presentation folder, deleting it from the presentation and re-inserting it. You hope (desperately) that when you move the whole package, it will run on the new machine. The new way PFCMedia adds a menu to your menu bar called “PFCMedia”. There are a few menu choices:
Installing PFCMedia To install PFCMedia, you need to go to www.PFCMedia.com. Once there, click the download button. Before you download, read the page. I can’t stress this enough. In order for PFCMedia to install, you need to make sure that some Windows components are installed on your machine. If you don’t have the following components, you can’t install PFCMedia:
If you don’t have these installed, or aren’t sure if you do, use the link on the PFCMedia download page to get the pieces. It is well worth the time and bandwidth. Once you have the three Windows components installed, download the add-in installer. Save it to your computer, then navigate to it and open it. You will be guided through the installation. If you didn’t listen and don’t have the Windows components added, you will be told to go get them. Once the installation process is complete, open PowerPoint and choose Tools> Add-ins. Click the Add New button and navigate to the PFCMedia folder (generally it will be under your Programs directory). Select the PFCMedia file and click your way back to the PowerPoint interface. You will see that the PFCMedia menu has been added. Running PFCMedia I am not going to go through adding each type of media in this article. For this article, we are going to focus on adding media from a file. If you want to see how to use each of the options, let me know and I will do additional articles on those sources. Before you add your media file, save your presentation. If you don’t save it, PFCMedia will tell you to. Then, from the PFCMedia menu, choose Insert MultiMedia> Media from File.
To start adding your media, click either the Windows button or the SWF Files button. Windows lets you add sounds and movies, SWF Files lets you add Flash pieces. We are going to add a movie, so click the Windows button. Navigate to your movie, click it and click >>>. Notice – You didn’t need to move your movie, you just need to navigate to it. This does raise one of my few problems with the add-in. Because PFCMedia doesn’t know where your movies are, but it does know that they aren’t likely to be in the current directory, the navigation will always start at the My Computer level. It takes a few extra clicks to get to your files. I can live with it, but I wish it were different. Selecting a media item activates the Start Media button. You are now ready to let PFCMedia test your media item. This allows the add-in to verify that the movie or sound file can be played cleanly on your system. To start the test, click the “Start Test” button. If the movie or sound file can’t be played, a message box will come up with an error. If there is an error, the message box will point you to a section of the help that tells you what has gone wrong. The most common problem is that the media file you chose was corrupted. Once you have let the media file play for a bit, the Stop test button will become clickable. Click it. The next step is to tell PFCMedia how you want the piece animated. The four options should cover just about every start method you can think of. If, however, you find you need to change the animation, that can be done using the animation task pane after you are done inserting the video. Using PPT 2000 or earlier? Not a problem. Read the help on using a legacy system. It tells you everything you need to know. Once you have read the help, click the check box for legacy. Once you have set up how to start the media, it is time to let PFCMedia do its real work. Click the Process/Insert button. You will see messages that keep you informed of the status of the conversion. PFC is copying your media locally and converting it to a compressed version that should be available on most Windows machines. Once the conversion process is completed, you will return to editing your presentation. Now for the cool part: You are done! The video is in your presentation, and the condensed file is in the same folder. Save and close your presentation. Open a Windows Explorer window and check out the size of the video. You will immediately notice that your video has been re-named to have PFC at the end of it. This lets you know that the video was processed by PFCMedia and is cleanly movable. Chances are, the video file has shrunk considerably in size. In one test I did, the video shrunk from 2,949K to 839K. Pretty great, huh? This presentation and the movie can now be picked up and moved (together) to another folder or another machine and will work FOR CERTAIN! Ok, so what’s the flip side? There are a couple of things that I wish the tool did differently. First off, I don’t recommend using PFCMedia to add sounds or movies to your master slides if there are more than one master slide set. You won’t like the result. Second, if you go to register your copy and you don’t have email on the machine you are using, you can’t register it. Registration is machine dependent, so the emails must come from the machine with PFCMedia installed. Third, as I said, the default location for pulling movies is a little weird. I wish that the tool remembered where I pulled from before and started there. The developer knows I wish for it, but he hasn’t fulfilled that wish yet. Fourth … Well, I don’t know that there is a fourth. I helped test the thing. Most everything I found as far as bugs Austin solved. And that brings up another of the great advantages of this tool. You can download the add-in for free and use it for two weeks. This is just long enough to get you addicted to it. When you buy the add-in, for all of US$49.95, you get a year’s free support and upgrades. In addition, as additional media types are added, you will get special prices on the modules. My Conclusion? You already guessed it – Get this add-in! You need it, you will love it, and it is priced way cheaper than it should be! Kathryn Jacobs,
Microsoft MVP, PowerPoint and OneNote Get OneNote answers at http://www.onenoteanswers.com/ Cook anything outdoors with http://www.outdoorcook.com Kathy is a trainer, writer, Girl Scout, parent, and whatever else there is time for.
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