How to crop a movie in PowerPoint 2004?

[Tony]

How to crop a movie in PowerPoint 2004 version 11.5.5 (Office 2004
version 11.5.6) on Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard)?

I have a QuickTime ".mov" movie that shows a black area on top and
bottom, which I would like not to show. I have seen that I can click
the movie to select it in PowerPoint, and then select the "View -
Toolbars - Picture" menu, click the Crop tool and crop the movie, but
it seems that only the first frame is cropped. How to crop all the
movie frames at once?

Thanks.

 

[Jim Gordon Mac MVP]

How to crop a movie in PowerPoint 2004 version 11.5.5 (Office 2004
version 11.5.6) on Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard)?

I have a QuickTime ".mov" movie that shows a black area on top and
bottom, which I would like not to show. I have seen that I can click the
movie to select it in PowerPoint, and then select the "View - Toolbars -
Picture" menu, click the Crop tool and crop the movie, but it seems that
only the first frame is cropped. How to crop all the movie frames at once?

Thanks.

Hi Tony,

PowerPoint does not currently have that capability, nor can I think of a
work-around within PowerPoint. The beta version of PowerPoint 2010 lets
you put shapes on top of movies, which you could use as a mask to hide
the part of the movie you want to play - but we don't know if this new
capability is coming in the next version of Office or not.

For now, I would use SnapZPro or Camtasia and capture the desired
portion of the movie as a new movie file.

-Jim

 

[Tony]

Camtasia

Thanks. Actually, I did such masking with white rectangles to get the
desired result in Normal View (movie without the top and bottom black
areas), but once I switch to Slide Show AND start playing the movie,
the black areas show again, which ruins the trick!

 

[Jim Gordon Mac MVP]

Thanks. Actually, I did such masking with white rectangles to get the
desired result in Normal View (movie without the top and bottom black
areas), but once I switch to Slide Show AND start playing the movie, the
black areas show again, which ruins the trick!

You are correct. Currently, movies always play "on top" of all other
slide objects. In PowerPoint 2010 new features let you can have objects
on top of the movies, and you can have multiple movies that overlap.
Hopefully all of this comes to the Mac version later this year.

-Jim