Academic Computing & Technology

Have you ever needed to get pictures or a movie you've imported into a PowerPoint back out to use in another presentation or on a web page? I might have an easier way when copy-and-paste just won't cut it.

Apple's Keynote.

Open the PowerPoint presentation in Apple's Keynote application. When you save the newly converted Keynote presentation, all the assets get bundled with the presentation. Just right click on the file and choose "Show Package Contents." You will see all of the images and other media files from your presentation. You can now open the files in Photoshop to edit, reuse them in another presentation, or even post them on a web page.

We frequently get asked by faculty about getting clips from DVDs to use in their classes. For most of them, it just too much hassle. With the release of VLC 1.0 (available at videolan.org), it is now as easy as clicking a button.

I could spend all day discussing the ethical and Fair Use issues that arise from this, but to save time, I will just cover the technical part.

First, if you haven't already, download the new version of VLC. To enable recording, in the menu bar select View -> Advanced Controls. Click the record button to start saving the video, and when you have reached the end of the clip, click the record button again to stop. The video clip will be saved in MPEG format within your Documents folder.

For illustrated instructions, please visit the How-To Geek for the instructions of How To Copy a DVD with VLC 1.0.

This, sadly, does not work with the OS X version of VLC. :-(