I have been asked to give an hour long talk on birds at a local ornithology club, following on from a talk I gave last year. In my previous talk I showed a mixture of still photography and SD video to illustrate the diversity of birds seen in my local area, and it was easy to insert the video clips into Power Point. This year's follow-up talk will use many of the sequences I have captured in HD video using a Canon XL-H1A, and I would like to integrate the video clips into Power Point if possible.

My questions are:

(i) is it possible to use HD video in a Power Point presentation, or would I be better burning the clips onto a Blu-Ray DVD ? The latter would be less slick because I'd have to switch from laptop to DVD player several times during the talk.
(ii) what kind of projector would I need to allow me to project the HD video to its best advantage ? The audience will be around 25-30 people in a room dimension 60 x 40 feet approximately. I am considering renting a video projector for this purpose.

Thanks,

Neil

Neil,

I'm a Mac guy, but for many years have consulted with folks who needed to embed my videos into PP presentations - and I've got to say it's always been a really "iffy" proposition.

While PP has long had the "ability" to play videos from within the app, in practice both myself and many of my friends in the business have acknowledged that if a presentation is going to crash, it's MOST likely to do so while trying to run a video inside the PowerPoint interface.

I had hoped Vista would fix things. But as you know, Vista's acceptance has been somewhat rocky. Most corporate types I know are STILL running WinXP. And to my knowledge, there's been little work updating PP to be more compatible with Vista.

I haven't worked on a presentation I haven't been able to convince my clients to convert either to Keynote on a Mac or, better yet, author as a DVD with chapters instead of slides so that the damn thing works consistently and anywhere.

Perhaps someone else here has different experiences and commonly works with High Def video inside PPt. with success. If so, I for one would LOVE to hear about it. Particularly what hardware/software combination is stable for running ANY embedded video and how you've sized and/or encoded that video in order to both look good and play smoothly.

a simple PC will fit. Of course you will avoid the standard corporate XP install, running in the background:

- an disk encryption system that makes your drive sluggish
- an aggressive antivirus that scan the full drive each time you open a file
- a wifi card that pops-up every minute the list of available network and ask if you want to connect
- script in the background that try to update your PC.
- all the alphabet in network drives mapped that are just making explorer going wild each time you open file.
- nice chat application (skype,sametime, AOL) running in the background and trying to connect with the rest of universe (aka all your friends and colleagues).
- a screen saver that download pictures of the Fuji mount and others nice landscapes every 2 minutes.
- a nice mail client (outlook, lotus notes) that is replicating you 6gig mail database every 15 minutes.
- a windows media player configured to show you the latest news about Mrs Montana, Spears and Hilton each time you open it.
- a quicktime player that try to update your pc every time you lauch it.
- a sound profile that lauch a 20 sec sound FX each time you open/close a window or put something in the waste basket.
- a power profile that try to put you system/harddisk in sleep mode after 5 minute while on battery (or worse even while on power supply).
- google try to update your toolbar/desktop while competing with the 6 others utilities/toolbars (yahoo, aol, etc...) installed in your PC, supposeddly to "increase" performance.
- Itunes looking for music on your drive or on the network.

.....and so on....

I never had problem to run anything in powerpoint, at any resolution.