Keynote 09 to YouTube
Over the last few years I have tried to move away from the traditional paper handout and explore offering course material in a range of different formats. With Apple Keynote I have offered iPod / iPhone versions of presentations to download via shared areas and VLEs with the hope they would be used as a revision tool.
This week I have started to update my presentations to Keynote 09 and in doing so have discovered a number of new features when it comes to sharing formats.
Firstly the problematic export to ‘flash’ has now gone. You can still export to images, Quicktime, html and iPod but 09 introduces a new ‘send to YouTube’ feature. It should be noted that the export options have also moved from the File Menu to a new ‘Share’ menu like that on iMovie.
Keynote offers massive potential in the production of teaching resources with features such as the ability to export to Quicktime, unique slide and element transitions and also the ease in which media can be managed. I haven’t even mentioned the brilliant alpha feature (see here).
I have been playing with the YouTube export settings and have concluded that presentations destined for YouTube will likely have be a slightly altered version of the original Keynote.
I haven’t quite got my head around how presentations that contain video clips will fair given the user has to set the slide time (see below) but for basic content the YouTube feature offers a whole new way to share this type of content.
The first thing to note videos uploaded to YouTube with the ‘personal video’ option ticked are set as private automatically. The private feature allows the video to be limited to 25 user accounts so this may be restrictive for some applications.
Any suggestions on how to best limit access to uploaded content (if even necessary) would be appreciated. This maybe for an entire department that has more than 25 members etc.
This is my second attempt to send to YouTube, in The first instance I had the slideshow document size set to 1024×768. For some reason this added white bars at the top and bottom of the presentation. This version is 1280×720.
I am not sure what you think of the quality of the final video. Firstly it is a particularly uninteresting presentation. Some of the smaller text boxes are a little hard to read and perhaps I would tweak future presentations for exporting to YouTube.
To be honest there wasn’t a massive jump in quality between the Mobile and Medium options and a ‘High’ option would be a nice additional feature.
That said it does offer an additional resource for anyone to share their Keynotes after the presentation.
You can download a trial of the new iWork now from the Apple site or buy it (and pre-order iLife) from the Apple Store Get the iPhone / Touch Application here.
5 Comments
Nice article. FYI, you can use Automator to added rendered narration to your Keynote presentations in preparation for upload to YouTube. The following linked page contains a video tutorial of how this is done.
http://www.apple.com/applescript/automation/automator/learn.html
As a matter of fact, all of the videos on this page are created using Keynote and Automator.
Enjoy — Sal
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I have been experimenting as well with this.
I also noticed Apple has removed, Export as Flash, which for me, is not a good thing.
I have (Windows) tools, that export PPTs as Flash, that Flash file (to me anyway) is far better quality
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This might not be the solution for quality issues, but worth a try. If the limiting factor on quality is the version youtube is showing you, append ‘&fmt=18′ onto the URL that you have for your presentation. This makes youtube show you a higher quality H264 version of any clip, if one is available.
If however, the quality is limited purely by the export from Keynote, this won’t make a difference.
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Thanks Gavin. I have added that to the end of the URLs. I am not sure it made much difference though ?
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In that case, you need to improve the quality of the file going to YouTube. I’m afraid it’s more manual.
1. Choose export to Quicktime and create an suitable H264 file
2. Manually upload to YouTube or use the uploader of your choice.
What I found with iMovie 08 was that the “export to YouTube” option in there didn’t produce an original export file of a quality I was sufficiently happy with, no matter which quality preset I chose.
If you choose export to Quicktime, you can choose your own size and quality settings and supply YouTube with a much higher quality original, so the ‘&fmt=18′ URL trick will work. Hope this works for you.
Gavin.
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