I Want to Put Text in Front of a Video in Powerpoint

This seems easy at first. Insert the video, add the text box, select video and send to back. But no matter how you play with order settings the video always jumps to the front when you play it - the text is hidden!

This is because the video is actually playing outside of Powerpoint (in mplay32.exe) and the playing window is in front of the Powerpointpoint window.

You can simply make the video window smaller and put the text below or above the window. You can buy quite expensive add on programs that may or may not do what you want. However the only way to get the text on top without an add on is to put it in the video itself and this isn't that difficult!

First you need Windows Movie Maker v.2, good news is that if you have Windows XP you may well already have it. Look for a shortcut in Start > All programs OR a folder in the program folder "Movie Maker" OR do a search for "moviemk.exe". If it isn't there you can download it free from Microsoft downloads (Windows XP required). This program enables you to add text overlays and it's not that difficult!

How to Do it!

Open Movie Maker, start new project and use "Import into collections" to import the video. You should work on a copy of the video and retain the original.

Drag the video preview icon on to the timeline. It the timeline is showing as a story board press Ctrl T to get timeline view or click on "show as timeline".

In the Tools menu choose "Titles and credits..." and then click "title on the selected clip" (unless you want one of the other options!). You should get two areas to type in text (title and subtitle). Type in your text and you'll see a preview to the right. If you wish, click to see different animation or text font and colour. When you're happy click "Done, add title to movie"

A title icon appears in the title overlay timeline. This can be resized to change the duration of the effect or dragged to any position to change the entrance time.

You can add more titles by repeating the steps from Tools > Titles and credits.

Finally File > Save movie file ready to insert into Powerpoint. Not that hard was it!

If you have earlier versions of Windows with Movie Maker v.1 you can experiment to get a similar effect but v.2 is a huge improvement!

Title and sub title

Change animation / font / colour

More Tutorials

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