Adding Video into shape

What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to frame the video with a particular shape around the edges?

I would like to insert a shape and then insert a video so that the video takes the shape of the shape I inserted.

I'm not sure if you can do that.The closest way you might do that is to place an image overtop the video, with a transparent cutout in the middle. See the attached screenshot. Is that what you want?

This was the best I could come up with on short notice...

put a video in the base layer, with a shape over the top of it, then edit the border of the shape to black out the rest of the screen, leaving me with the oval shape... Not pretty, but I'm certainly interested to see if anyone else has ideas.

I'm trying to create a "chat box" look. I've attached an example here- I would like to insert a video in the blue circle. Any insight would be appreciated.

I didn't look at it, but have you tried putting the video on a background, and filling the shape with background?

Hi Suzanne and David,

I had to remove the previous version of this post as the Storyline file was far too large for some reason (100 Mb !).

I have used David's example to hopefully answer both of your queries. In short, it is possible to show video within a shape, but you have to do some tweaking in order to achieve it.

What I have done is to copy David's chat overlay into Photoshop, select the circular chat window with the elliptical marquee tool, delete the contents by pressing Delete and then create a transparent background in the background layer using the background eraser tool. Finally, in order to retain the transparency, I have saved it as a GIF file.

The next stage is to add a new layer to your Storyline slide and import the video that you require (in my case I simply used one from the Content Library). Next you insert your new GIF file into the same layer, on-top of the video. Now you can right click on the video and adjust its size and position so that it is completely obscured by the GIF image, except for the portion that should now be visible through the transparent circle.

Finally, you need to add a trigger to the base layer on your slide to show the video layer when the timeline starts for the slide. If you download the attached file and preview it, it will hopefully show you what can be achieved. 

Tom 'Cool Man' has produced this video which walks through creating a video in a shape using Powerpoint:

If nothing else, you can create your shaped video in Powerpoint and then export it as a video into Storyline. Hope that helps.

Hi Sam,

Thanks for posting the video. Simple and straight forward and a lot less hassle than Photoshop for this evolution.

Thanks! I will try that. 

Thank you, Sam and Ned! These are very easy to understand instructions. 

Great Video Thanks for sharing.