Datavideo has a software that can sent your computer monitor output to a firewire out as a DV signal. I haven't try the software myself but Datavideo do have a demo version available for download.
PPT-100 PowerPoint to DV Program.
Probably worth a try.

Norm

Thanks,
I do have access to a Sony 1024 scan converter, might be worth a try and I'll try both of those pieces of software.

Not a MBA this person, the PPTs from the MBAs were fine, this is from a silk. Makes sense, the text is exactly as readable as the fine print at the bottom of their contracts.

Bob.

My laptop has a S video out connection. I have had good luck hooking that up to a capture card and capturing the video.

And you can try Camtasia screen capture. The trial is good for 30 days.

Dave T2

The slides are static so no need to worry about it being video.
Tried using Snagit for screen capture as well as PPT exporters.
This text ends up with sub pixel sized lines i.e. as grey not black. Restoring the blacks with curves helps readability, adding GB and then Unsharpen Mask helps wrangle the line twitter however most of the letters end up bleeding into one another.
One thing I'm yet to try is a real optical path. Display the PPTs on a LCD and shoot that with a video camera. Sounds a really stupid idea as I'll be introducing all manner of artifacts from the lens and DV compression. Thing is though during the live presentation I whip the camera around to get reference shots of which slide the presenter is talking about and that vision from just the camera pointed at the screen looks better than any result from digital processing.

Bob.

I do it by saving the PowerPoint as png files. I will first go to page setup and change it from screen presentation to "ledger paper ( 11x17)". This will increase the resolution of the slides it outputs. Then "Save As" and under "save as type" you can select jpeg, png, tif and many others. The png works best for me. I place those on the timeline and work with them from there. For slide with information on the edges I simply use pan/crop to shrink the slide so there is black border around it. I usually add a bout 10% to allow for a safe area. I have create DVDs of our All Staff meetings each month for the 75% of the staff that can't make it. Using this technique a I can provide readable slides and zoom in on the eye charts that can't be read in the meetings.

Charlie

And you can also change the resolution of Powerpoint slides if you don't mind hacking the registry - usual warnings apply...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;827745&Product=ppt2003

Cheers

gb

Before you go hacking the registry, Powerpoint Image Exporter is a neat (and free) little app developed by Liam Kennedy that allows you to convert your Powerpoint presentation into a sequence of still images (jpeg, gif, png formats supported) at any resolution (size) you require.

Mike

I've been using Liam's utility for several years, thank you Liam. I think I made a small change to it but apart from that it's been very useful.

Getting the PPts exported is not the problem here, the friggin Adobe font is the problem I'm realising. The "News Gothic" font renders at one pixel wide no matter how much your blow it up:

"Similar in design to Franklin Gothic, News Gothic was one of a number of sans serif faces manufactured by American Type Founders in the early years of the twentieth century. Initially cut as a light sans, heavier versions were made in the 1940s and 50s along with some condensed weights. The News Gothic font family offers an uncomplicated design that is well suited for use in newspapers and magazines for headlines and in advertisements"

Which is all fine on a printed page!
Now I'm capturing the slides at 1289x1024 and the text in this font is already looking pretty bad. It gets worse though. The text is contained in an area larger than 787x576 (PAL 4:3 frame) so to get it to fit inside title safe area it needs to be scaled down a bit. That makes it even worse looking and sub pixel width.
All that's before it goes through 4:2:0 chroma sampling and down a composite video feed to a TV. I also need to reduce the resolution further to avoid line twitter on interlaced displays. The wonder is you can see anything!

It gets better though. This font seems to be managed by Adobe's type manager! Yish, now who said DPI is a meaningless value with video? The way this font is rendered seems dependant on the DPI setting in PS. At 787x576 72dpi it looks pretty bad, change to 300dpi and it looks fine, rasterise it and change back to 72 dpi and it looks way, way better than the 72dpi rastered version. Probably also has something to do with this font using two files, the font file and an outline management file, all of which means bugger all to me.

I'll soldier on with this and try a few other suggestions made above.
Thanks everyone for all the input.

Bob.