Use Live Camera Feed to Make an Incredible Cameo Appearance in PowerPoint

Are you really “into” PowerPoint?

Then you should be inserting a cameo into your slides.

When you are eager to make better eye contact with those hundreds in your virtual audience, add a cameo!

Cameo Is a Hot, New PowerPoint Feature

It has been given a prime location on the Insert tab of the ribbon.

When you insert a cameo, you are inserting a window to your web camera and you will appear on the slide.

It is as if you have become a live bullet point — popping up wherever you need your audience to focus!

Cameo enables you to insert a live video feed inside and around the PowerPoint slide. Now you can get “up close and personal” with your content to dazzle your attendees with a more personalized presentation.

Why Use PowerPoint’s Cameo Feature?

At times it can be a struggle to maintain a person’s attention — especially in virtual presentation platforms like Adobe Connect, Teams, WebEx and Zoom.

But now, when running a presentation, instead of your video being cemented above, below, or beside your slides, relegated to the margins, it can be anywhere; fading in, moving and fading out as needed.

When you show your presentation, you can show “you.”

How Do I Insert a Cameo in PowerPoint?

To insert a cameo frame:

1. Click Insert
2. Click Cameo

How easy is that?

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How Do I Format a Cameo in PowerPoint?

Once you have inserted the frame, you can:

• Move it
• Resize it
• Apply a custom camera style to it
• Modify its shape
• Format its border
• Rotate it
• Crop it, and
• Apply camera effects to it (shadow, glow, etc.)

PowerPoint displays these cameo options on the Camera tab that appears when you click the cameo frame.

In addition, when you right-click the cameo frame, a context menu provides more options, including Format Camera…

…which triggers the Format Pane where you will find an option to re-color the video feed.

How Can I Add Animation to the PowerPoint Cameo Frame?

You can animate the cameo frame just like any other PowerPoint object on a slide.

1. Select the frame.
2. On the animations tab, add one or more triggered or automatic animations.

Using PowerPoint Cameo Frames With the Morph Transition

If you love animating slide transitions with Morph, apply the Morph transition to a series of slides created by duplicating the first and moving the cameo frame on the successive slides.

Here is the recipe for combining a cameo and Morph (used in the GIF above):

The Morph Technique Steps

1. Create a slide.
2. Insert a cameo frame.
3. Apply the Morph transition to this slide.
4. Duplicate the completed slide several times (Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+D).
5. On the duplicates of the original slide, move or resize the cameo object.
   
6. When you run the presentation, the cameo will “Morph” from location to location on each slide.

What’s Left?

The only thing remaining is to add your creativity!

Because, with a cameo object, you are showing how “into” PowerPoint you can visibly be.

Note: Cameo is a Microsoft 365 feature available in version 202207 (Build 15427.20148) and later.

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