Lou Thompson writes: >When I test my undergraduates, I like to show them brief clips of films >and ask them to comment on specific things (editing, lighting, >etc). Cueing was easy enough to do with videotapes, but now that I'm >using DVDs almost exclusively it's becoming a problem. When showing clips in lectures, I usually rip the appropriate chapter from the DVD, convert the IFO to a DVCAM format AVI, edit as necessary using Adobe Premiere (e.g. stick a fade in and out at either and and add a subtitle stating what the film is) and then render to an MPEG-2 IBP-frame program stream file, which is then dropped into my Powerpoint presentation. By selecting the 'Expand to full screen' and 'start playing when clicked' attributes in Powerpoint, the video will just play at full screen at the appropriate moment and then disappear, leaving the previous slide in its place. This is also useful because if I'm dealing with source material which has significant technical defects (e.g. a transfer from pink Eastmancolor or a silent film transferred at 25fps) I can correct this at the editing stage. I've checked the legality of this out with my institution, and am told that it is legal for me to do this under the provisions of the Educational Recording Agency licence, which allows UK universities to screen material recorded off-air or from retail DVDs released in this country as part of scheduled classes. Given that I'm screening the exact same material as if I'd shown it from the original DVD and the purpose of copying it is simply to make the presentation easier, that's OK (or so I'm told). The only thing I can't do is to make the files available to students along with the Powerpoint slides - something which would be logistically difficult anyway, as most are several hundred megabytes (a lecture containing three or four 3-minute clips is usually too big to go on a CD-ROM and needs a DVD). I couldn't do (and have not done) that with material that does not fall within our ERA scheme, e.g. DVDs imported from or material recorded offair in another country. Needless to say, I don't know if this would be legally possible in the US. I would guess that you must also have a licensing scheme which enables copyright material to be shown in lectures and seminars: if so, it's a case of whether that allows it. Leo Leo Enticknap Curator, Northern Region Film & Television Archive Middlesbrough, UK www.nrfta.org.uk P.S. Could I make a polite request for posters to please steer clear of using 'teaser' subject titles? 'A basic question' could mean anything from something about DVDs to 'Why does a cat's fur have holes in it where its eyes are?'. I probably receive around 200 emails a day all told, and subject lines which accurately describe their content makes sifting through them a lot easier. ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu