PowerPoint 2010 Video Pipeline: Embedded video file sizes

Logic: understand video impacts on file size

An important part of presentation creation and distribution is to understand the impact of inserting videos into PowerPoint 2010 on file size. Let's go through some information I presented in San Diego at the Presentation Summit.

Option 1: an embedded video- video is 25 meg and uncompressed
What was done	What it looks like
Insert 25 meg video and save file = 25,683 Kb. For our purposes, there are 1024 kilo-bytes in a megabyte. PowerPoint adds the video and adds very little else to the file size- very efficient.
Add bevel and 3d perspective effects to the same video, and save = 25,688 Kb. When you add the effects, only a couple of lines of internal code are added to tell PowerPoint what the video will look like. Because the original video is still unmodified (which also means you undo the effects), the file size increase is tiny- very efficient.
Let's now start again and look at trimming video. we will commence again with a 25 meg video embedded in PowerPoint 2010.
Insert 25 meg video, trim first 20 of 30 seconds and save. File size = 27,904 Kb, a significant increase. Why? PowerPoint 2010 keeps the information at the start of the file, even if you trim it- not what you expect. So, what would be the result if we compress this video? Remember, compressing will discard any trimmed portion (and make any recovery of the trimmed portion impossible).
Trim 20 seconds from the video, compress and save. File size = 10,294 Kb. Compressing has significantly reduced the file size, discarding the first 20 seconds of the video.
So, what of the original video? What would have happened if we compressed it before we added effects, of trimmed any part of the video?
Insert 25 meg video, compress file and save. File size = 20,143 Kb. There was some scope to save file size by compressing the original video after it was inserted.

Next: Linked video file sizes

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