Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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In one of my earliest updates, I described how I used video shot of me at PowerPoint LIVE; I both created a PowerPoint presentation and burn it to DVD. As I explained, this can be useful as a backup of the project, or to show some of the information in the presentation without even using a computer – just by putting the finished disc into a DVD player.

More recently, I received a call from a potential client who had "some video" that he wanted to use in PowerPoint. As with many similar calls he was unable to tell me just what kind of video it was (AVI, WMV, QuickTime, MPG, etc.); all he knew was it was on a disc and he wanted to add it to a slideshow that his sales team could work with. I said, "Send it over."

Because he was a Mac guy, I assumed that when I first inserted the disc it was in that format; My Computer did not find it at all. Then a lightbulb went off, and I put it into my DVD drive. Shazzam! Some smart guy (or gal) had burned a DVD of his precious video.

This got me to thinking. Others have asked me to get video from movie DVDs, and I explain that complex copy protection schemes generally prevent me from doing so. That's not what we're doing here; since I live in Los Angeles, I don't want entertainment attorneys banging on my door!

I will say that the principles we use here will work with movie DVDs if (a big IF) you download or purchase a program to crack the encryption and turn the movies into PC video (generally MPG or AVI format).

The program I'm going to use is not such a program. It's a program I referred to in the previous update from Ulead, MovieFactory. (It's up to version 4 but what we're doing here can be accomplished with earlier versions, starting with 3.0). You can also import DVD video from other Ulead products (including their high end DVD Workshop), and from other software publishers, including Adobe and Sonic Solutions (now the owners of Roxio Easy Media Creator).

Anyway, the key is to locate the video. If we insert a non-copyright DVD into a computer DVD ROM drive, and right-click the icon and select Explore...

Figure 734

We should see two strange sets of folders: one called VIDEO_TS, and the other AUDIO_TS. One would think that in the first folder we would find video files in MPG format...

Figure 735

But no – what we have is a hodge-podge of data that a DVD player understands, but not a PC. We can infer from the huge file that it's a video file, but PC programs like PowerPoint won't know what to do with it.

To work with the video, I drag the VIDEO_TS folder to my desktop (I don't need to worry about the other folder). It will take a few minutes.

Now let's open MovieFactory. Like most of these programs it asks you what type of project you want to create and names a new folder for it. We make it think we're going to create a new DVD.

In the main editor, we have an option to Import DVD Video, which lets us Browse to the folder we moved to the Desktop.

Figure 736

Clicking it lets us instantly see all of the video "Scenes" in the DVD project. We can select one or more of these by clicking on them...

Figure 737

And when we click Finish they are "ripped" or extracted into our DVD storyboard. The idea here is that we can edit them again and create a new DVD.

When ripping is complete, we can say good-bye and thanks to MovieFactory... but not before we hover over the clips and discover just where they've been saved: into the MovieFactory Capture Folder in My Documents.

Figure 738

Now, exploring that folder, we find that we have a number of Windows-friendly MPG video files to work with. Believe it or not, they can be instantly brought into PowerPoint, which we'll do in a minute.

Figure 739

But first, let's think. If we've worked with PowerPoint video in the past, we know that the files are always linked to the presentation. This folder for the MovieFactory project may not be the best place for the video to be, since we'll want the PowerPoint file to remain in the same folder -- just in case we want to move it and preserve the relative and absolute links.

And then what if we want to trim or edit some of these clips? Presumably, they've already been trimmed once for the DVD to get rid of lousy footage, but we may still want shorter versions.

We can use a video editor like Ulead Media Studio Pro to open the video files in a Timeline.

Figure 740

And we can use the Preview window to trim the clips further. Then we can create new movie files in any format and save them to another folder if we wish with the Create Video File feature.

Figure 741

With the finished files in the folder we want, we can create a new PowerPoint presentation, save it in the same folder (preferably), and use the Insert > Movies and Sounds > Movie from File command.

After I insert the MPG movie file, I can choose whether to play it automatically or when clicked (my preference). Also, I can resize it in the PowerPoint slide to accommodate bullets or other content.

Figure 742

A final comment – because I've kept the movie in MPG format it should play nicely on a Mac as well. If, for example, I had tried to use Windows MovieMaker to edit the clip, I would have had to save it as a WMV file (after editing), which would not have enabled Mac playback.

Nonetheless, here I was able to extract a native DVD movie file and save it as a PC friendly MPG file using a third party program, edit it in another Windows video editor, and eventually use the content as part of a PowerPoint presentation.

You might want to consider that next time you need to create a presentation for your company or any other client who has burned some promotional or educational video to DVD.

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