Playing a presentation through a sound system

[Casey]

I have copies over 3 gigs of Hollywood movie clips that comprise a
theatrical presentation at my retirement community. Some of the clips
(all AVI) include sound tracks from the video and some do not. The
presentation would be playing a clip and showing a couple of still
pictures followed by a person performing live. Then we start another
video clip, etc. The whole PP presentation will be shown on a new data
projector onto a 13'x13' screen. The problem is...how do I get PP to
play from the laptop or data projector through the auditorium's sound
system..which is new and state of the art? My new laptop has a
mini-plug for headphones. Is there a way to connect a computer into a
sound system? One person suggested placing a microphone next to the
laptop's speaker but I would think the sound would be terrible that
way.
I am using PP from Office 2000 but can easily upgrade to 2003 if that
would help the situation. The data projector and laptop are brand new.

 

[Troy @ TLC Creative]

1) Convert all of your movie clips to a smaller format, .mpeg1 or .wmv. The
vast amount of data may slow your playback, cause delays before a clip
begins playing, etc.
The easiest method is to use the pfcmedia add-in (www.pfcmedia.com). This
will convert clips to .wmv format of the same quality and playback size. But
a 500MB .avi will become a 50-100MB .wmv (or smaller).

2) For the sound you need an XLR-to-Mini adaptor. Here is an example found
on quick google search "XLR to mini": http://www.dvshop.ca/cables/xlr.html

You need to the auditorium sound system to run an XLR cable to your
computer. You plug the XLR to Mini adaptor to the provided XLR cable and
then to your computer. Generally you should set your computer audio to about
3/4 the max volume and let the auditorium sound system control it from
there.