[CRITICAL UPDATE - Anyone using Office 2003 should install the critical
update as soon as possible. From PowerPoint, choose "Help -> Check for
Updates".]
Hell Brendan,
PowerPoint doesn't currently support the kind of timing/synchronization
that you are looking for. For media we can only synchronize the beginning
of the sound to another event. We can't control the beginning of other
events (such as transitions) based on how many seconds of a media file has
been played. The feature for this degree of timing control is just not
built into the product. This is mostly because two completely different
architectures are used. For multimedia playback we use system API calls
(PowerPoint has very little control over what happens after the media has
begun to play) while animations and transitions are controlled using
PowerPoint's built in procedures.
So, for example, if you want to sychronize animations and transitions with
something other than just the beginning of media playback (on same slide or
over multiple slides), you will get inconsistent results from system to
system or even on the same system (depending on what data is still cached
in virtual memory).
If some kind of more deterministic, system independent, multimedia
synchronization with animations and transitions is important to you (or
anyone else reading this message) for Microsoft to consider for some future
version of PowerPoint (or if it's not possible, perhaps features within
PowerPoint to help you avoid trying to sychronize something that we can't
guarantee will always be synchronized), so you don't have to resort to
exporting to other formats (movies, shockwave flash, etc.), which would
result is some loss of formatting and/or fidelity, don't forget to send
your feedback to Microsoft at:
http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp
As with all product suggestions, it's important that you not just state
your wish but also WHY it is important to you that your product suggestion
be implemented by Microsoft. Microsoft receives thousands of product
suggestions every day and we read each one but, in any given product
development cycle, there are only sufficient resources to address the ones
that are most important to our customers so take the extra time to state
your case as clearly and completely as possible.
IMPORTANT: Each submission should be a single suggestion (not a list of
suggestions)
John Langhans
Microsoft Corporation
Supportability Program Manager
Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows
Microsoft Office Picture Manager for Windows
For FAQ's, highlights and top issues, visit the Microsoft PowerPoint
support center at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=ppt
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=kbhowto
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