When you say "action shots" are you loking to get captured still images off of a old video (photo montage), or do you want short clips from old videos (video montage) ?
Some friendly suggestions:
1. There is freeware out there that can take care of your needs. Those telling you to go buy a new Mac are out of their gordes.
2. You might need to borrow a better video card and you would do well with at least 1GB of RAM, and 2 hard drives. One for windows and the video capture software, one for the video file to be saved on. Borrow a video card from a friend/colleague, or use your $100 budget to get a new card. Someone's kid is a pc gamer who has a dual output 512MB or higher video ram card that can appear at 2048 x 768 resolution or better. Most new cards can do widescreen dual screen, which would be even better for your wall projection. I haven't seen a projection screen at PC monitor resolution for sale in years.
3. You need to take your video and record it into a digital stream. This can be time consuming, give yourself plenty of time to record these videos. (Not sure in what format your video is in). Use www.virtualdub.org software for this. Rip at highest quality you can, remove audio capture to save yourself time. You are trying to prevent "shearing" and to keep the blacks actually black.
4. If you are doing video montage, try the free
http://sourceforge.net/projects/movica first.
5. keynote.org is a good way to control a "powerpoint like" presentation
6. Make sure your PC has a dual monitor card running and you have 1 monitor next to you and one as the wall projector. This is another reason you'll need a high end video card. Disaster prevention step.
7. Practice, through in a classical CD and practice scrollling through the montage.
This project sounds pretty cool, good luck!
Like a slideshow, I guess, is the best way to describe it. But I need to control the timing of how the slides are shown and thus I think Powerpoint might be the best way to go about that part of it.
Thank you for that rundown on specifics. Much appreciated. I will ping you all when my volunteer work is done.
Thank you for all your instructions. Lucky for me - someone else did all the video conversion over from videotape to digitized footage on a DVD. So all I had to do was to playback on the DVD drive on this specific computer (from which I'm posting right now), then, and capture.