I am filming a day long presentation tomorrow with a bunch of different presenters using different powerpoint presentations shown on a big screen.
I am thinking about having my TRV900 lined up right on the screen and record to my laptop's external hard drive all day.
I will have my PD170 zoomed in on the speaker.
Do you think the footage from the 900 will be exceptable enough to edit in with the footage?
The other option is to use a program like camstudio after the fact to get the powerpoint into an avi format, but that is ALOT of additional time and work. Plus it sends the rendering time through the roof due to the different frame size.

What do you guys think?

Normally not a great way to get the video but if shoot the screen is the only choice it will depend on the projector and screen(are they true data grade? will the ambient light be off?is it a large room and is the projector a large venue unit?
You may want to try to get real tight on the screen then in post reduce the size to PIP with your speaker shots
How many presentations are there? it might not be too bad recomperring them

Generally, you'll be able to get the best quality by using the Camstudio route. (I've been using camtasia for this).
One option to cut your render times would be to convert the resulting AVI to DV (maybe just render overnight) for general use in your edit, but with the screen captured AVI, you could always zoom in for more detail if you wanted.

If you're really intent on recording with a camera, you may want to check to see if the computer has an SVideo or just an RCA output jack. They're getting to be fairly common these days, especially for laptops targeted at sales/presention types. You might be able to record off the SVideo output while the projector itself is driven from the VGA output.

Good luck.

If you have access to the Powerpoint presentation, just save the images as a .jpg and import to your editing system.