I want to be able to click on a picture on a slide and have a movie pop up and start playing, and then have the movie go away when it’s done playing. I have pored over the Powerpoint “help” pages, but of course it doesn’t tell me how to do this stuff, it only tells me (vaguely) that it can (or maybe not) be done.
Any thoughts?
I hope I understand correctly. You can embed a video file, then right click it and select “Change Picture” and it will be replaced with the image you select. You can then click it in presentation mode to play the video.
You could also add a hyperlink to a video on a picture, but I think that would normally make Media Player pop up in a separate window.
It kind of depends on the desired sequence of events. If the “picture” you want to click on is the first frame of the movie, then you can set up a custom animation sequence in which you click on the movie to play it, and once it’s done, assign an exit effect such as fade or disappear. That’s the simplest way I can think of. If the starting picture is different, that can be a little more complicated. I’ve done it before, but I don’t have the time right now to test the sequence.
Yeah- the picture is not the first frame of the movie, unfortunately- it’s a completely different pic that i want to be able to click and have this movie come out of nowhere, start playing, and then disappear after it’s done. 
You’re probably going to need to think of creative ways of making it appear as if this is happening. For example, you could do this across multiple slides. Add a hyperlink to the picture that takes you to another slide that has the same picture in the same position. The second slide also has the movie, which is set to appear (or fade in, or zoom in, or whatever) automatically, then play, then disappear. It may take some experimenting, but it can be done.
Well, unfortunately the person requesting this wants multiple movies on one slide, wants to be able to randomly click around and play whichever movie that makes their hair fly back, in whatever order that they’re feeling at the moment. The only way I’ve been able to work it is in a forward progression: click to slide, click to start first mov, click to stop, click to start next movie, etc…
Here’s how to do this in PowerPoint 2007.
Insert the video, and select either play automatically or on click (doesn’t matter). Go to custom animation and delete the effect it added for the video.
Insert the picture and add effect disappear on click.
Select the video and add effect movie actions->play. Then right click on the effect and choose start with previous. Then right click and choose effect options->movie settings->hide while not playing.
That should do it for you.
You should be able to link to different slides with the videos, then add an effect to trigger a link back to the control slide when they’re done.
Yep- I’ve got that all set up now.
The only part that’s not jiving is the presenter’s desire to have the option of playing the movies out of order. If they get a wild hair and want to play movie #2 first, then #1, then #3, then the next time they run through they decide to do 3/1/2, then 3/2/1- that’s what I can’t solve. I don’t know if there’s a way to set them to play in a different order each time they run through it.
Ok, try this. You can right click the movie in the animation list, select timing, then choose “start effect on click of” and then choose each picture that corresponds with each movie.
But as far as I can tell, there’s still an “animation order” (the box right above “start animation on mouse click”). If I’m not mistaken, clicking can only follow the strict order of that list, and the only way you can change the order of play is by manually moving that animation order list around. Thusly preventing you from reordering on the fly…