Trim a video

- [Instructor] Ideally the video clips you use in your presentations will be edited to the exact lengths you need them to be, but in a real world setting, this isn't always the case. Sometimes you'll be using footage that you didn't edit, or that you maybe don't have access to the original footage for. Maybe you only want to use a few seconds of a longer clip. Fortunately it's really easy to trim down clips in PowerPoint and you can do this for both embedded and linked videos. I'm gonna go to slide four of the 04_01_trim exercise file, and on the slide we already have a video embedded here. I'm gonna click to select it, and when I do so, notice that two additional tabs appear up in the ribbon, under the Video Tools category.

We have Format and Playback. I'm gonna click the Playback tab, and this is where I'll find the Trim Video tool. Clicking that opens up this editing window. At the top you can see our clip name on the left and the duration on the right. You can see it's currently about 35 seconds long which I think is too long for what I'm using it for on this slide. Below the playback area, we have the timeline. You can see the green handle on the left, and that represents the beginning of the clip, and the red handle on the right is the ending of the clip. If you look closely you can also see waveforms in the timeline representing the audio in the clip.

They're a little hard to see here because the audio is a little bit low, but these can help you find the right place to make your edits if you're concerned about not cutting off anyone talking or other sounds. Below the timeline are specific start and end times. These change as you move the timeline trim handles, and you can also type in specific values in the boxes, or use the up and down arrows to set the trim times. I'll drag that back. These buttons here are the playback controls. I can play and pause with the center button, and the buttons on either side allow me to advance or go back one frame at a time.

By using these buttons I can click approximately where I want to start and stop up here in the playback area, and then I can fine-tune that moment. So let's go back to the beginning and see where we want to make our opening edit. All right so right about at the three and a half second mark is probably where we want to be, so I'm gonna grab the green handle on the left, and trim that into right about three and a half seconds, and again I can also use these arrows here, be more precise, and we can check that out.

- Hansel & Petal has been for years providing these ... - [Instructor] Okay that works for me. Now I'm also gonna trim out the end of this clip so let's keep listening. - Most amazingly beautiful floral arrangements I could even imagine. Often I'll come in here and I'll be stressed out from work and I just need to get something, and I'm always greeted with a smile, they always provide excellent recommendations, and they never fail to send me out of here with an amazing bouquet or an amazing product, and you just can't beat the price. So as far as customers ... - [Instructor] Okay so right there after she mentions the price, I'll make my edit.

Let's roll back and find out where that time code is. - You just can't beat the price. - [Instructor] So right at about the 26.8 second mark there. This time instead of dragging the handle over, I'll just type that value in. I'll try 26.8, and I'll press Tab to leave that field to lock that in, and we can tell by looking at the start and end markers that we've trimmed this video down now. You can click Play again to test it out here, or we can click OK, and we can test it out on the slide.

- Hansel & Petal has been for years providing me with the most amazingly beautiful floral arrangements. - [Instructor] That's the opening edit, I'll jump to the end. - Out of here with an amazing bouquet, an amazing product, and you just can't beat the price. - [Instructor] Okay so I've successfully trimmed down this video and kept the portion that I want to use on my slide. Now I do feel like the clip starts and ends a bit too abruptly, but we'll be able to fix that by adding some fades to the beginning and end of the clip, and I'll be showing you how to do that in an upcoming move. Also if you didn't get the edit exactly right, you can always come back up and click the Trim Video button again, and you can see our edit points are still there, and you can make your adjustments.

I'm okay with my edits so I'll click Cancel. Now later in this course I'll be talking about PowerPoint's compress media feature, which optimizes and reduces the size of your presentation by removing unused content, and that includes portions of videos that you've trimmed out. So just be aware that until you do that, you'll always be able to go back and restore the trimmed out portions of your videos. But once you compress your media, you'll lose the trimmed portions and the only way to get them back is to reimport the original full-length video. Also, I should mention that some video formats don't allow you to trim them in PowerPoint, so if the Trim Video button is grayed out, you'll need to edit your video in another editing application before bringing it into PowerPoint, but for most videos you should have no problem trimming them, and it can save you a lot of time to do that work in PowerPoint, so you don't have to go into another application, make you're edits, and then reimport the video into your presentation.