Adding a Video to an Impress Presentation

Sometimes, a short video demonstrating how to do something is much more meaningful than a series of pictures. Adding a video to an Impress slide is almost exactly the same as the process for adding a picture described in the post: Creating a Basic, Multimedia Presentation with Impress. This post will show you how to do this.

In one of my presentations, I use a brief presentation called "Making a Doctor's Appointment" to show how an Impress presentation can be used to emulate a role-playing session between a learner and a tutor. In one of the slides, I use the following video I made of myself dialing the mock phone number of the doctor's office:

(Note: left click on the little arrow at the bottom left of the image to play the video.)





I will now show you how to insert this video in an Impress slide, so it will begin playing automatically when the slide appears on a computer screen.

(1) First. left click on "Insert" in the toolbar in the main Impress window , then left click on "Movie and Sound" in the menu that appears.



















(2) Navigate to the folder on your computer that contains the video you wish to insert, select the video by left clicking on it and left click on "Open."






















Note that the video format is AVI in this example.

(3) There are many video formats, but Impress will work with only a few. If you click on the down arrow at the bottom right of the menu, you will see a list of the supported formats.


























In a subsequent post, I will show how to use another free tool called Any Video Converter to convert video files from one format to another.


(4) An image of the first frame of the video will now appear in the center of the workspace.


















(5) The video image is a little too large. To make it smaller,

(a) right click anywhere within the image and

(b) left click on "Position and Size . . . ."





















(6) Next, verify that "Keep Ratio" is checked before you reduce the width and height of the image.






















(7) Reduce either the width or the height. (Because "Keep Ratio" is checked, the size of the other will change proportionally.) Then left click on "OK."





















(8) The video image is now smaller in size.





















(9) Now, drag and drop the video image to where you would like it to appear on the slide.





















(10) There is now room for explanatory text to the left of it.






















(11) Add text, as described in the post Creating a Basic, Multimedia Presentation with Impress.





















You can also use Audacity to record audio that will play simultaneously with the video when the slide is displayed on a computer. Insert the audio as described in the post Creating a Basic, Multimedia Presentation with Impress.

12. Finally, preview the slide, to see how it will appear to the learner.


















Notes:

(1) Impress presentations containing combination of photos, audio and video would be useful for creating workplace materials that combine on-the-job-training with ESL instruction. A work process could be broken down into its component parts and packaged in an instructional, multimedia presentation. The vocabulary and sentences used in the explanatory text and audio would be the same as used on the job.