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PowerPoint Cameo puts your video selfie into a slide

by Annabelle Almer 20 February 2022

Microsoft is introducing a new feature to PowerPoint called Cameo that lets you put a live camera feed into your slides. The camera feed can be moved, resized, cropped, and styled just like any other image. Designer in PowerPoint can also be used to add flair to slides that use cameo.

Cameo is an excellent feature for those presenting live, such as on Teams. The audience can see you and the slide content at the same time without having to switch attention between two windows.

There are a lot more possible than simply a little box of live video. The video can appear in many shapes, borders, alignments and transitions including Morph.

How Cameo works

Open your existing presentation in PowerPoint. Insert a live camera feed into your presentation by going to Insert | Cameo.

Of course, you’ll need to turn the camera on, do that by clicking on the camera icon in the bottom left corner of the profile image or go to Camera | Camera | Preview.

Change Cameo Camera

You can also change the source of the camera feed. Go to Camera | Camera | Preview but click on the down-arrow button to preview and select the one you want.

Once you’ve selected your preferred camera source, just go to Presenter View to preview your presentation.

Style through Cameo

There are a variety of different shapes/camera styles to choose from Camera | Camera Styles, you can play around with different styles for each different slide, for example rectangle, circles, diamonds etc. But that’s not all, you can really go creative if you select the ‘Camera Shape’ drop down arrow on the side.

Borders & Shapes

You have a vast number of other choices, including basic shapes, block arrows, equation shapes, callouts, stars and banners etc.

From there, you can also change the border color and effects around the camera frame, including Shadow, Glow, Reflection and Soft Edges.

If you’re stuck on ideas, you can go to the Design tab | Design ideas to provide different slide examples for you to choose from.

Alignment

Place cameo video behind or infront of your live camera feed, in Microsoft’s example below, they’ve used the camera feed as the main background for the slide, overlaid by a text box.

Transitions

Want a nice creative, added touch to your presentations? If you go to the Transitions tab, you’ll be able to apply different transitions to your live camera feeds.

Known Issues

Within the PowerPoint slide show and Presenter View, you won’t have access to the Camera On/Off settings.

Sadly, only direct installed cameras are supported. Not virtual cameras, which is a shame because it limits what video feeds can be added via cameo.

Who gets it

For PowerPoint Cameo to work, users will need to have an integrated or external camera connected to their computer, plus PowerPoint must be granted camera access within the privacy settings too. It’ll be available soon for PowerPoint for Mac, PowerPoint Live in Teams, and the Record Slideshow feature in PowerPoint for Windows.

Microsoft will be rolling this feature out to Office Insiders running Beta Channel Version 2202 (Build 14922.10000) or later.

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