Considerations for using video and audio

- [Narrator] Before we really get started here, I wanted to take a moment to just say that, although PowerPoint gives you the ability to include all kinds of audio and video in your presentations, and serve them up in fancy ways, it's important to remember that the purpose of a presentation is to impart your information or content to your audience in a memorable way. It shouldn't be about dazzling them with endless affects, and busy complex slides. You want them to walk away with the information in their memory, not the way your video rotated onto the screen, or the music you had playing in the background. As a way to illustrate this, let's look at this example.

The first slide here is already kinda busy. It's basically just the title slide for a presentation, but in addition to the title text in the center, it also has graphics in the upper right and left hand corners, and this border down at the bottom, and we can see this audio icon on the slide, indicating that audio's embedded on the slide. So, let's go into Slide Show mode and check this out. (bells tinkling) (soft music) So this is an example of a slide that's just been layered with visual and audio distractions.

Starting with that chime sound effect and the busy transition at the opening, and then we had the individual graphic transitions for the two images in the corners, and this is actually an animated GIF in the upper right-hand corner that just keeps animating non-stop. It's really visually distracting, and it detracts from the text on the page. Let's look at another example. (soft music) So in this case, we've used a more subtle transition at the top.

We just have the company logo in the corner, instead of extraneous clip art, and for visual interest, we have a movie playing full-screen in the background. In terms of audio we've reduced the overall volume levels, so it's not blaring out at our audience, and we've also removed the audio icon from the slide. So even though we incorporated both video and audio into the slide, it has a more subtle and less drawing effect overall. Now this isn't to say you should never have anything visually interesting on your slides, but I think the primary concept to keep in mind, is subtlety. If every one of your slides is loud and distracting, you'll have nowhere to go, when you want to create some real impact, or to emphasize a particularly important piece of information.

PowerPoint has a great collection of multi-media tools, but you still have to develop the ability to know when and where to best use them. So while you're hopefully going to walk away from this course with the knowledge of how to use PowerPoint's multi-media tools in multiple ways, you should also bear in mind that just because you know how to apply a number of effects to your slides, it doesn't mean you should try to cram as many of them as possible in to each slide. Doing so may create a memorable presentation, but not for the reasons you want your presentation to be remembered.