Create an animated intro for videos in PowerPoint

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If you want to create a series of short training or promotional videos, it’s useful to have an intro that you put in front of each video. This might include your company’s branding or just create a theme that viewers associate with your videos.

Since you’ll be adding a video, it looks better when you animate the intro so that the intro isn’t static. You can easily create animation in PowerPoint that is quite video-like.

This is the animated intro I’ll describe in this post.

After the intro, you’ll add the main message or training, which can be:

Live video of you speaking: You can use your webcam, Zoom meeting, or even your smartphone
Screensharing of you showing your computer screen: You can use Camtasia, Zoom, or even PowerPoint
Slides with your content: You can create slides and narrate them

It’s common to add an outro at the end and you can create it in the same way you create an intro.

In this post, I’ll explain how I created the animated slide and how to use it for a video that includes that slide, your content, plus an outro.

1. Add content to your slide

The first step is to add content to your slide. This can include video, shapes, images, and text.

Add a background video

You can add a video to your presentation and that video will then become part of the video that you create when you export to video. How cool is that?

To make the slide more video-like, I downloaded a video from pixabay.com. You’ll find the video that I used here. This video functions as a background for the slide. You could use a static image instead.

To insert the video, choose Insert, Video, Video on My PC. Expand it to cover the entire slide. On the Playback tab (which appears when you select the video), next to Start, choose Automatically. As you add animation, be sure that the video stays as the first item of animation in the Animation Pane.

This video is too long and you can trim it in PowerPoint. On the Playback tab, choose Trim Video and drag the sliders. But you won’t know how long to make it until you finish your animations. In this situation, I ended up trimming it to about 6 seconds because the animation was about that long.

Add the slide elements–shapes and text

In order to make the text clearer, I added a semi-transparent rectangle on the right side of the slide on top of the video. Insert a rectangle, then right-click it and choose Format Shape. Click the Fill icon and choose a color. I chose Black. Then set the transparency. After you add the text, you might want to adjust the transparency level to make sure the text is readable but the video still shows through.

Here, I used a transparency setting of 24%.

Insert text boxes on top of the rectangle

Because I wanted to animate each line of text separately, I inserted 3 text boxes and entered the text. A variety of sizes helps keep your viewers interested. Remember, this is not your basic text slide!

To box the text, I used a Frame. You can find it in the Shapes gallery on the Home tab, under Basic Shapes. You can get the same effect using a rectangle with no fill and a wide outline, but the Frame sets that all up for you. Choose the desired outline color and place it around the text.

2. Animate the elements

Now comes the fun part, animating the elements.

Using the Selection Pane (Home tab, Editing group, Select, Selection Pane), I renamed all of the objects. This is very helpful when you’re animating multiple objects, as well as assigning multiple animations to objects.

Notice that the first item is the Pixabay video.

Click the Animations tab and click Animations Pane. For each animation:

Choose Add Animation.
Choose the animation you want.
Choose the effect options you want, either by clicking Effect Options on the ribbon or by right-clicking the animation in the Animation Pane and choosing Effect Options.
Specify the Start options on the ribbon (On Click, With Previous, or After Previous).
Set the timing (duration and delay) on the ribbon.

Here’s the rundown of the objects and their animations.

Entrance:

Black rectangle: Animation-Fly In / Effect Option-From Right / Start-With Previous / Duration-0.75 seconds

Textbox-TODAY’S: Animation-Fly In / Effect Option-From Right / Start-With Previous / Duration-0.75 seconds / Delay-0.70 seconds

Textbox-TIPS: Animation-Fly In / Effect Option-From Right / Start-With Previous / Duration-0.75 seconds / Delay-1.0 second

Textbox-for better time mgmt: Animation-Fly In / Effect Option-From Right / Start-With Previous / Duration-0.75 seconds / Delay-1.3 seconds

Blue Frame: Animation-Wheel / Effect Option-3 Spokes / Start-With Previous / Duration-0.75 seconds / Delay-1.6 seconds

Exit:

Blue Frame: Animation-Wheel / Effect Option-` Spoke / Start-With Previous / Duration-1.0 second / Delay-3.5 seconds

Textbox-TODAY’S: Animation-Fly Out/ Effect Option-To Right / Start-With Previous / Duration-0.75 seconds / Delay-4.10 seconds

Textbox-TIPS: Animation-Fly Out/ Effect Option-To Right / Start-With Previous / Duration-0.75 seconds / Delay-4.50 seconds

Textbox-for better time mgmt: Animation-Fly Out/ Effect Option-To Right / Start-With Previous / Duration-0.75 seconds / Delay-4.70 seconds

When you have this set up, test it in Slide Show view and make adjustments as desired.

3. Create the final video

To create a video with an intro, outro, and content in the middle, you’ll compile the elements and set slide timings.

Add the outro

Add another slide with outro animation. You can duplicate the intro slide and change the text or animation.

Add the content

Insert a slide between the intro and outro. If you created a video, insert it there, size it to cover the entire slide, and on the Playback tab, set it to start Automatically.

If you want to use slides, add those between the intro and outro.

Set slide timing

You need to specify how much time the video will spend on each slide. For the content video, determine how long it is. You can do that by hovering your cursor over the end of the timeline (to the right of the Play button).

For the animation, in the Animation Pane, hover your cursor over the right side of the last animation item’s Start/End box (green for Entrance, red for Exit) and you’ll see the total time of the animation. Here, it’s 5.45 seconds.

For each slide, in the Advance Slide section of the Transitions tab, check the After checkbox and enter the number of seconds. I usually round up to the nearest second, so I entered 6.00. If there’s text that you want people to read, leave enough time for them to read it. You might want to leave some extra time on the last slide so that the video doesn’t end abruptly after the last animation.

Go into Slide Show view and watch the animation and video play. You shouldn’t have to click at all. If something isn’t working properly, make corrections.

Export as a video

To create the video, choose File, Export, Create a Video. From the drop-down list, choose the video quality. The options will depend on your version of PowerPoint — recent versions offer up to 4K. If you’ll be putting the video online, you might choose a lower resolution. If you’ll show it on a large screen, choose the highest resolution you have available.

The drop-down list below that lets you choose to use or not use timings and animations. The default is to use them, which is what you want.

Click Create Video to export the video. The process of creating the video can take some time; it depends on the length and quality. PowerPoint saves the video in the same location as the presentation file.

Having problems?

I tested this on a Windows 10 PC with Office 365 and an MP4 video. I’ve seen issues, especially when mixing PC and Mac platforms. For example, if you use your iPhone to create a video for your content and it’s in MOV format, then you might have problems if you try to insert it as a video on your PC.

See this article, Video and audio file formats supported in PowerPoint, for extensive information about multiple versions of PowerPoint and operating systems.

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