By Brad Wright

Almost everyone has fallen asleep during someone’s presentation. As bad as it is to sit through a boring presentation, it’s much worse to be giving a presentation to a sleeping audience. This dreaded situation can be even worse when you are in front of an important customer.

The only way to avoid this is to keep the audience interested from start to finish. This means you have to use all means necessary to hold your audience’s interest. One way to do this is to add powerful, compelling, audio and video imagery to your presentation. In order to do this, the process of working with video needs to be very easy.

To make video easier to use, I wrote a piece of software called DVDxDV. DVDxDV extracts video from a DVD, and creates a file that can be used in a Keynote presentation. Creating video clips with DVDxDV from a DVD is fast and easy. In addition, you can keep a large library of video on DVD, so you can always find the right video clip for your presentation. This article takes you through the steps of extracting video with my software.

Finding The Right Video Clip for a Slide
Figuring out what works best for a particular slide can be easy. For instance, one DVDxDV customer is a teacher who uses video clips from documentaries to create presentations for his high school history classes. Another customer is a Hollywood director who uses DVDxDV to present famous scenes from his films. Other customers extract video taped depositions from DVD, and then use them in the courtroom.

Preparing the DVD for Use
The first step in getting video from a DVD is to determine whether or not the DVD in question is encrypted. Frequently, people who have legitimate rights to the DVD content must decrypt their own DVD. A good solution for this is a program called DVDBackup. It un-encrypts a DVD and copies the contents to your computer’s hard drive.

If you have an unencrypted DVD, all you need to do is place it your computer, so that DVDxDV can read it.

Extracting with DVDxDV
DVDxDV can read a DVD in three ways. It will read an unencrypted DVD directly from your computer’s DVDROM drive. It can read a DVD that has been copied to your computer’s hard drive. Finally, it’s also able open an individual “.VOB” file. For this example, I’m using an unencrypted DVD.

The first step is to place the DVD in your computer and then wait for it to show up on your desktop.

Next, switch to DVDxDV and select “Open DVD” from the file menu.

After a few seconds, DVDxDV will display the contents of the DVD.

Using the preview functions, the user can scrub through the video timeline and find a specific scene to extract. Just like most video editing programs, you can mark an in and out points.

To extract the video clip, select the “New Movie” item from the “Extract” menu.

After this, DVDxDV displays a list of presets.

Select “iMovie/FCP-NTSC” from the presets. Next, DVDxDV will prompt you for a place to save the file.

After picking the place to save the file, DVDxDV starts extracting the video. Depending on the speed of your computer and the length of the clip, the extraction can take a few minutes or several hours. The best thing to do is to only extract the portion of video you need. This will make the process much faster.

After the extraction has finished, the clip is ready to use with Keynote. In the example below, I used the extracted clip as a background for this slide. I used the Sandstone Theme and set the video clip opacity to 39 percent. This allows some of the Sandstone background to mix in with the video clip.

Conclusion
Extracting video from a DVD can now be fast and easy. With a large collection of DVDs, you can always find the perfect video for your presentation. Since DVD provides a standard format for distributing high quality video, it may become a vehicle for distributing royalty-free video clips. Make your next presentation come alive with video from a DVD.

Disclaimer: Keynoteuser gets no payment from the posting of this tutorial. We have posted it because we think it will be usefull to Keynote users who wish to use DVD footage in their presentations. Keynoteuser.com and the Peat Group, Inc. are not affiliated with DVDxDV in any way.