I know about the “washout” setting but that seems to washout the picture to white, whereas I want to be able to see my background image through it. What I am trying to do is have an animated watermark, either via animated gif or a video clip set to a low opacity/transparency. Can this be done? The clip is about 80 frames long so I would rather not fake it by editing each frame of the video…
What you’re asking can’t be done within PowerPoint. While it can interpret the alpha channel, it can’t change it. You’d need to import the video into a fancier program and re-render it or come up with something else.
Ok, related question: you can fade an image in and you can fade an image out, but can you fade an image to, say, 20% and have it stay there? Like I want an image to fade in, but not all the way. I want it to remain kind of ghosty.
(oh, and just to be clear about my first question… I’m not talking about a partial transparency like one area is transparent and another is not, which is the more common way to do alpha channel transparency… I basically just want what the the “fade” effect does, but then stay mostly-faded rather than coming all the way solid.)
Thanks, you just gave me something to do at work for about 15 minutes.
While not quite a guru, I can figure out a think or two about powerpoint, and yes there is a way to do it. One you have your movie in Powerpoint, right click on the object and click on Custom Animation. Click Add Effect, Emphasis, More Effects. On the lower lefthand side of the basic effects is Transparency. Click that and press OK. Now right click on the video object, click Custom Animation. Select the Animation that you just created, right click, and press Effect Options. I would set the amount to 75% for a good dose of transparency, that seems to show the most effect.
One other issue you might have (I have no idea your PP skill, so I’m trying to make it as detailed at possible) is that the transparency won’t show up right away when you start the powerpoint. To make sure this occurs (if you want it to), change the timing from On Click to Start after Previous. Hope that clears things up a bit
I tried that and it seems hopeful… but the transparency goes away as soon as the video starts to play. I’ve messed with the timeline a bunch of ways to make sure it’s overlapping in the right places and so on, it is set to start with previous, etc. I even tried doing a fade in and a fade out in addition to the transparency, but it isn’t working.
Also, I know you can use animated gifs in PPT, and I’ve even done it before but it was a while ago. I am trying to do that to see if it works better than an .avi but I can’t get the gif to play at all… it just sits there on frame 1. I tried putting it in as an image and as a movie, and the same thing happens with both…?
By the way I’m using PowerPoint 2003