Thank you for helping that come into words.

That wasn’t dramatic overstatement.

I want to echo that the way mr. rm put the clips together is great (what I call “doing something illegal in order to do something legal”). One of the things that really annoys me about using video is when there’s incompetent or sloppy operation of the projector. I don’t want to see the icons on someone’s desktop, nor do I want to see a cursor, menu or the projector’s “no signal” screen. I have seen all of those at one time or another since we started using video (which we still only do a few times a year). PET PEEVE.

This is my first time to use video in worship and I am still deeply ambivalent about it theologically and liturgically, but if we were going to do it I was determined that it not be sloppy. What that means in my case is that my dear devoted husband got up much earlier today than he would have had to, had he been married to someone else.

It’s easy for me to say, but if you can decipher what’s involved, it’s worth the time and effort to rip the DVD and put the clips together in powerpoint, with black screens in between each clip, rather than simply bookmarking the DVD. Unless you have people running the projector who are really on the ball.

The first is completely legal and leads to the highest quality video: most PC-based DVD player programs support “bookmarks”, so you can easily queue up the starting places for the clips you want. However, it requires the operator to stop the clip manually, and you can end up with extaneous computer cursors and video player stuff showing on the screen unless the operator is also adept with the “video mute” feature of the projector.

The second way is technically illegal and results in slightly lower-quality video (and requires more advance work), but the operation during the service is much easier. First, you ‘rip’ the DVD using one of the many freely-availabile DVD decryption programs. This is illegal because you are circumventing the DVD’s copy protection (thanks to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act), even though your use of the clips falls under “fair use” or your umbrella media license (if you have one).

After you rip the DVD you’ll have a collection of ‘.VOB’ files. There’s a program called “Flask MPEG” that can take excerpts from these and convert them into AVI files (assuming windows… I don’t know about the Mac). You’ll have to separately download a video compression codec like “Divx” to use with Flask (there are both legal / non-free and illegal / free codecs). There’s usually some quality loss in this step, but usually not so much that you’d notice in your typical church setting.

Once you’ve got the individual clips, there are a bunch of different ways to play them. We’ve been embedding them in blank powerpoint slides, so the operator literally just has to push a button to start each clip at the appropriate time.

Hope this helps!