We know that we can make beautiful presentation slide works with Microsoft PowerPoint. But we don’t often get to use it. Probably, once or twice a year at most… In fact, you can export your PowerPoint presentation projects in QuickTime. But how do you use these presentation QuickTime movies with Final Cut Pro?

For example, we created a simple presentation project with Microsoft PowerPoint 2008. (See Screenshot 01.) If I want to produce a QuickTime movie out of it, I’ll just have to choose ‘Save as Movie…’ under File. (See Screenshot 02.) Then I decide on Movie dimensions. You can keep the default resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. Or change it to whatever you want , as shown in Screenshot 03, after selecting Custom. Preferably, you want the screen ratio to be 4 to 3 though not necessary.

Screenshot 01

Screenshot 02

Screenshot 03

That’s not very tough, isn’t it? And PowerPoint will produce your presentation movie in a matter of several seconds (See Screenshot 04.), depending the number of slides in the presentation project and length of transition between slides. I should make sure that QuickTime can open this presentation movie. Of course, that’s no problem. (See Screenshot 05.)

Screenshot 04

Screenshot 05

Screenshot 06

Let’s move on to read this presentation movie with Final Cut Pro. In fact, all I have to do is just drag and drop the movie onto Final Cut Pro’s Browser window. Or is it? Actually, if I try to read the file with Final Cut Pro, I get an error message that says “Insufficient content for edit.” (See Screenshot 06.) Huh!? There is sufficient content, according to QuickTime. What happened?

Let’s open the movie file with Final Cut Pro. Opening Inspector, the frame rate of the presentation movie is shown as 0.22. (See Screenshot 07.) Ahh… Taking a good look at Screenshot 05, QuickTime also says that the duration of the movie file is 0. Right… A movie must have a minimum of 24 FPs if you want to read it with Final Cut Pro.

Screenshot 07

Screenshot 08

Screenshot 09

Now, we know what the problem is in importing PowerPoint presentation movies to Final Cut Pro. So what can we do to read PowerPoint movies with Final Pro? Simply, re-compress them with QuickTime Pro. Or you can use MPEG Streamclip, a freeware title from Squared 5, or whatever you have to correctly specify the frame rate. As shown in Screenshot 08, I’ve set it to 24, which is often used for motion pictures. Can Final Cut Pro read this file? As shown in Screenshot 09, no problem! Final Cut Pro reads this movie with no red (unrendered) line.






Final Cut Pro and QuickTime are products of Apple, Inc.
Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 is a product of Microsoft Corporation.
MPEG Streamclip is a product of Squared 5.