Video Import Quality

[Antorious]

I'm importing video into Powerpoint with Presenter. Is FLV files the only file type I can import without losing quality? I've tried importing with a couple of different video file types (avi, mp4) and the quality decreases a lot.

[tki55555]

‌same problem. Any advice?

[Jorma_at_CoSo]

MP4 and FLV should be able to be inserted without changing the quality. Other accepted formats will be converted based on the selected profile in the Insert Video tool. There isn't a lot of control, but basically you can choose Low (400kbps), Medium (800kbps) or High (1200kbps) for the quality of the converted video. Medium is the default setting, so that is likely what you encoded the videos to.

I've never been a fan of these options and have used a video conversion tool to make videos for importing to Presenter. There are many options out there (Adobe Media Encoder, Handbrake, AVS4YOU, etc.), just find one that works for you. AME should be included if you have any Creative Suite or a CC membership. Handbrake is free. AVS4YOU's full suite of tools is $60 for a lifetime of updates and support.

[tki55555]

Thanks! With FLV the quality is much better.

[RicherRags]

This is not about video quality per se, but here is some additional detail that might be of interest to you if you have to use videos often in your elearning projects.

We added the capability to Publish a project to HTML5 in Presenter 10, primarily to support viewing the content on tablet browsers. It was in this release, that we integrated Adobe Media Encoder (AME) in the Import video workflow of Presenter. Basically, when user tries to import any video that is not an MP4 with H264 encoding, AME will kick in and convert that video to MP4. Now you may know that you can also insert a video into a slide via the Powerpoint's native insert video feature. If you used this method to import a non-MP4 video, AME will kick in when you publish the project to convert such videos as well into MP4.

Now this workflow does not give you control overt the quality settings for the conversion process. However once you have installed Presenter 10 or Presenter 11, you should also have Adobe Media Encoder on your machine. As suggested by Jorma@RealEyes, you can also use Adobe Media Encoder to convert videos to MP4 with the required settings that you desire and then import it into your Presenter project.

And finally, we also have a new way of getting video content into your Presenter projects. Sometimes you may actually have your video content on a site like YouTube or Vimeo and you may simply want to "link" to it, rather than embed the video in your project. In Presenter 11, we have two new features

a) Insert YouTube video - which can help you to "link" to a video that is hosted on YouTube. You can even specify the start and end points, and control visibility of the YouTube player controls

b) Insert Web Object - where you can link to any arbitrary webpage or a fragment of a page (like a widget for which you have embed code). With this method you can insert even a Vimeo video.

Hope you find this information useful

Cheers
Ramesh