Help w/ Digital video manipulation . . .

[KSig RC]

OK - for a massive presentation next week, I'm attempting to take some of our DVD footage from a study and insert it into PowerPoint. We don't have time to send it out to our AV guys (turnaround is too short), so I have to do it myself.

I would have no problem doing this from any other format, but the DVDs are obviously in .VOB format (and thus need to be ripped before I can work with the .avi files). Anyone have any easy way to rip these? What do you use to edit footage?

Right now, I'm using AVISynth as my conduit to rip the .VOB to .avi, and then I'm editing the .avi in Avid FreeDV - this works fine, but it's slow and does not really give me the options I'd like (ie reducing size, compression, etc.). Anyone have a better program to rip the .VOB into .avi? Preferably one with moderate functionality for reducing frame size and quality compression?

This is essentially deposition-quality footage, so I don't need any sort of full-screen DVD quality.