PowerPoint / video presentations

[PSA DC-9-30]

I have a couple of questions about using PowerPoint to create a very high quality presentation of my work for projection in a large lecture hall/auditorium.

I am presenting some of my electron micrographs (mostly 8-bit grayscale tiffs, but about a dozen 24 bit color tiffs as well) in slide show format at an upcoming meeting in Berlin, and I need these micrographs to look as good as possible projected on a large screen.  Obviously, the gold standard for print is 300ppi, but I really have no idea what resolution (i.e., pixel dimensions) is sufficient for this purpose. The original micrographs are about 2500 x 1700 pixels, but, in the name of keeping the file size manageable (60+ images), I am converting from tif to jpg, and would like to downsample a bit. Will downsampling to a maximum dimension of 1600 px result in any loss in quality? What about 1200 px? What should I aim for here?

Also, these slides will be accompanied by various music (Alice Coltrane, Beethoven, Morton Feldman), and I would like to just convert the whole thing into some sort of video format so that the whole thing will run automatically, and I will not have to advance the slides manually. How can I convert the Powerpoint to video format?

Thanks,
Kevin

[wolfnowl]

Resolution is going to depend somewhat on the projector you're using, but if it comes right down to it, the quality of the screen gets a say too.  There's only so much you can do with projections as with monitors.  As far as the Powerpoint file, why not save it as a .pps file?  You set the timings in the slideshow and save it as a show, and then you only need to double-click to play.

Mike.

[dwightgenius]

Personally, i think 1080p is enough.
Actually, you can play your PowerPoint presentations automatically without any click by setting transition and animation timings or rehearse timings.
As to output video format, if you are using PowerPoint 2010, you can output .wmv video with it. However, there are only 3 kinds of output resolution, and the largest size is 960*720, and the output video format is limited to .wmv.
If you want to output a higher resolution HD video, or DVD, even Blu-ray, it is recommended to use the ppt2dvd tool from Moyea, you can visit their website: http://www.dvd-ppt-slideshow.com/ to find it.