I want to overlay a powerpoint with a video (PIP)

[Howard Lee Harkness]

I was hoping this would be easy to do, but so far, I've just managed to confuse myself. I've played around a bit with Windows Live Movie Maker, but I can't figure out how to make it do what I want.

I have a powerpoint slide presentation, and a video of my wife doing the presentation before a live audience. She did a good job, but I didn't do so well with the recording. It was slightly out of focus, so you can't read the screen.

For the entire presentation, she is in the lower left corner. I would like to do a video with the powerpoint slides taking up most of the screen, with her presentation cropped to just her (in a rectangle), and shrunk down a bit to minimize the focus problem, and placed in the lower right of the screen, taking up about 1/10th (or less) of the total area. I would like to synchronize the slides with her presentation. So far, I haven't even been able to find a way to crop just one region of a video.

I need a relatively inexpensive way to do this. I've seen things similar to this, so I'm pretty sure it can be done. I'm willing to put in the effort to learn a FOSS video editing program if I can find one to do what I want (it would be nice to have video editing software I could run on Win7, my iMac, and Ubuntu).

I would greatly appreciate suggestions for what tools I need to install, and what general approach would work best to accomplish this.

[Cornucopia]

There is NO real good FOSS editing program. Period. Lightworks is ~free, but will take some getting used to, and much of its functionality is locked until you pay.
You can do this with free apps such as AVISynth, or Virtualdub, and if your "editing" complexity needs are very low (such as put whole video clip in one layer, put whole PPT clip in 2nd layer and composite together), you could get by with those, but for most REAL editing jobs, where you have scores of segments/clips and multiple transitions, as well as multiple layers of both video and audio, you are basically stuck with having to PAY. I'd suggest Vegas Movie Studio.

You're right in guessing that what you'd be doing is a PIP (picture-in-picture). You might be able to get by with a corner-wipe type split-screen, though I can't tell by your previous description whether you'll need to do a resize for one or the other clip (which would NOT be supported by an actual WIPE or PUSH). Whichever you try, you'll be putting one clip in one layer and another in a higher layer (on "top").

That's a bit to start,

Scott

[Cornucopia]

BTW, I am assuming you are trying to end up with a video (because an alternative way would be to insert the video clip into PPT). So you will need to export your PPT to a video stream/file first. There are a few different ways to do this - if you have trouble, let me know.

Scott