Well, the events are now over, and things went pretty smoothly (save for the last major event). Here's what I did. I found out in advance who had movies, and got all of their PowerPoints and video's ahead of time. I converted all of the PowerPoints over to Keynote, and just added slides in and embedded the video's there. This way, everything went as smoothly as possible. However, for the Superintendent, who couldn't decide what movies he wanted to show until 6:00 am the day of his presentation, I just had an assistant sit next to the projector and DVD player and feed the movies in on cue. COmpared to what we did last year (loading each PPT individually), this went much more smoothly.
As far as the Confidence Display went, I just positioned the laptop everything was running off of on the podium and ran a VGA cable to the projector (which sat on the lip of the stag and projected onto the
cyc for a nice, big picture. Keynote provided a nice presenter's display (although as I discovered, many presenters were confused by two slides on the screen of the same size, so I had to shrink the next slide block significantly so as not to confuse the presenters.