I need to give a lot of presentations for my job and I like to imbed video clips with sound in some of the powerpoint (Office 2007)slides.Generally, I can get the clips I want to play in the powerpoint presentation mode on my (Sony S series VGN S360) laptop which is running Vista with 1 gig of ram and has 35 gig of harddrive free. So far so good. Sometimes, I will get a situation in the middle of a presentation where the sound of the film or movie clip is playing nicely but the screen of the LCD projector goes black and will not show the video part of the clip at all. When this occurs, usually the video is playing nicely on the laptop but the LCD projector is showing simply a black screen. Can any of you please help me with this? Why does this occur? How can I fix it when I create the powerpoint presentation so that I minimize the chances of this happening? As you can expect, this is super embarassing when you are in the middle of a presentation before a live audience and they have to tell you that they cannot see anything, even though you are looking at a perfectly fine video clip on the presenting laptop hooked up to the LCD projector. Help!
Indeed this problem is happening more and more. I've done live events with embedded video in powerpoint for years and in the past few months there must have been some sort of update that is causing the issue because video will only play on one screen at a time. we are using sony vaio laptops VGN-FZ290. Is it an Nvidia issue? We're stuck!
Deighe. Firstly, PowerPoint does not allow you to embed video into a presentation. PowerPoint links to video files rather than embeds them into the presentation itself. There are many reasons for this powerpoint menace but the main reason is to reduce the actual file size of the presentation ppt file. By simply linking to the files rather than embedding them, the ppt file itself is much smaller, opens faster, requires, fewer system resources and therefore runs smoother. So when you link your video files powerpoint menace you will need to copy them over to the same folder as the ppt file on another machine in order to play the video files from the presentation. I noticed however powerpoint menace that you mention your files are .mov video files, or rather Quicktime movie files. Quicktime is a format created by Apple and is not as standard a component of the Windows operating system and requires a seperate player in which to run movies. So if your video files are in Quicktime format (.mov) you will need to install the Quicktime player on the other machine, and know that this will launch and then you will need to play the movie in the player etc. An alternative powerpoint menace is to convert the Quicktime movie files into another format which is inherent in Windows such as .WMV, or .MPG. These files can play from within your presentation itself and therefore either play automaitcally, after X seconds, or otherwise controlled by PowerPoint Actions.
We get this sometimes at the University I work at. usually, simply toggling off the laptop display will cure the problem. It seems some laptops just can't handle displaying the video in both laptop and projector screens. This tends to be more likely on older 3 years + laptops and/or low end models. One other possibility is that the resolution of the laptop should be 1024 x 768. Some higher resolutions will work but almost always 1024 will work with any projector.
