Question about cutting clips for a Powerpoint presentation

[tanealbhandari]

I tried doing some searches on this and think I found what I need but wanted to ask some follow-ups to see how to proceed. My wife has a dvd of an interview she conducted, and wants to cut out clips from this dvd to put into a Powerpoint presentation. I think the following link shows how to do this:

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic358361.html


I guess my 2 concerns are:
1) I just want to make sure that this doesn't just get the video (and no audio). I tried a couple of clips following the process, but my AUDIO_TS folder was always empty. That can't be right, can it?

2) Does anyone know of anything special I need to do to the clip to get it to work in Powerpoint? Does it matter if I make an AVI or a MP4? Does one of those (or another format) work best?


Thanks!

[Captain Satellite]

I do this all the time for my Safety presentations at work. I've gone through all the trial and error so I'll tell you what works for me.

Convert your files to .wmv files. Import those into your PP presentation. When you're finished, save as 'Package For CD' and save to a folder. That way all your files are in one folder and you're not tied to the computer that you put together your program on.

If you don't save it this way, it won't be able to find the media. I'm sure there are several ways but this works for me every month.

[gadgetguy]

Will this be played back using the full version of PowerPoint or just PowerPoint Viewer? My recent experience showed me it makes a difference. On the computer with the full version we didn't have any trouble playing DVD spec video, but the computer that was going to display the presentation only had Viewer and it would only play the audio. The video played fine in WMP but wouldn't play in PPV. I found that WMV and MPG1 worked fine, but I did not test any other formats (as I just went with MPG1).

[tanealbhandari]

Cool. Thanks for the tips. I'll give them a shot when I get home later. To answer some questions, yeah, I have the full version of Powerpoint on my laptop, not just the viewer. Also, I'm creating this presentation for my wife on my laptop, and that is where the presentation is going to be shown from as well.

Also, any thoughts on the empty AUDIO_TS folder?

Thanks a ton!

[rumplestiltskin]

AUDIO_TS is only there for compliance with the original "standard". No DVD today (or for many years) has made use of the folder.

Oh, one more thing: After you follow the advice above (any method), TEST the preso on the target machine before showing up and finding that it's not working because of some other issue you didn't anticipate.

[tanealbhandari]

Cool. Thanks for the info.

Yeah, I've done enough tech support in my life to know to test, re-test, and then re-re-test!

[gadgetguy]

The AUDIO_TS folder is for Audio-DVDs, something that never really took off. Early implementers of the standards wrongly assumed the empty folder had to be included for compliance and as a result some early players required it and most Authoring programs automatically include it.

[tanealbhandari]

Hmmm... Interesting. Seems like there's been enough time to remove it from that standard then, no?

[gadgetguy]

But the old players that mistakenly required it, still require it and there's no downside to leaving it there. It's just an empty directory entry.

[tanealbhandari]

Makes sense.

Man, wish I could hurry up and get home and try this out.

[tanealbhandari]

OK. Got a chance to try out the suggestions. I used DVDShrink to create my various VOB clips from the dvd. That seemed to work fine, but it's in the converting that I have some issues.

First of all, I couldn't get that Encode360 app to work. I can see on the status bar that its starts to encode, but then that's it. I let it sit for like 15 minutes or so and it didn't look like it was doing anything. When I went to close it, it said "Not Responding". Oh well. So I decided to try WinFF. Per Captain Satellite's suggestion I decided to try and create WMV files from my VOB files. It seemed to work, but for some reason, the final WMV files ended up having a weird aspect ratio of almost 3:4 (as opposed to getting it to be 4:3 or 16:9). Any thoughts on this?

[Captain Satellite]

Once again, I'm sure there are several ways to do this but this is what worked for me:

Any DVD I want to convert to .wmv, I first convert to .mpg then edit and convert to .wmv. It's what works best for me. No strange aspect ratios issues so I cannot comment on this. Very easy and foolproof so I stuck with this method.

[tanealbhandari]

What software did you use to convert from VOB to WMV? I think that's where my problem is, because I can see that in DVDShrink that my VOBs have the correct aspect ratio. It's just that WinFF that seems to be making it weird when creating the WMV.

[gadgetguy]

The VOBs from the DVD are not square pixel, so the resolution of 720x480 which is actually 3:2 gets stretched to either 16:9 or 4:3 on playback. I believe WMV only uses square pixels so the source 720x480 is displayed as 3:2. You need to resize your source to 640x480 before feeding to the WMV encoder to get a 4:3 display.

[tanealbhandari]

Cool. Thanks. I'll give that a shot when I get home.

What do you use to resize the source? Is this a setting that I should have initially made when using DVDShrink? Or is it another step with another tool prior to encoding as a WMV?

[gadgetguy]

I can't really comment on the correct procedure because I never use DVD as a source and I've only experimented with WMV. I primarily work in DV-AVI and my editing tools of choice are AVISynth and VirtualDub. I do know that you can open VOB in the latest version of VirtualDub and the mpeg plugin, and if it were me, after making any adjustments in AVISynth (or VirtualDub), I would save to an interim avi file using the Helix YV12 YUV Codec and then open that in WMM to encode to WMV. Of course, that's because those are the tools I'm used to and have, and like I said, I've only experimented with WMV. I'm sure there are other, better ways.

[tanealbhandari]

Cool. I'll try playing around with it and see what works.