Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

Combine Keynote2 audio/video tracks via QuickTime Pro Apps
Working on an iDVD project recently, I decided to take advantage of Keynote 2's wonderful graphical abilities and create a self-running slideshow to include in my project. Keynote will export slideshows as a quicktime movie, but it separates the audio and video tracks, thus creating a problem inserting it into my iDVD project. I figured I would simply combine the audio and video tracks in iMovie HD and save the result as a .dv file for iDVD.

Well, I could not not make the resulting movie look like crap, no matter what settings or codec I used. After some research, I was assured that iMovie's "preview" was causing the movie to look bad. This answer seemed silly to me. What else are you going to do with a movie other than look at it? And if the QuickTime player could display the movie crisply and without artifacts, iMovie (or Final Cut Pro for that matter) should be able to as well. Not so.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out. I didn't want my beautifully crafted movie/slideshow to look like garbage in my DVD project. I had finally just decided to leave it out completely when a possible solution occured to me. I explored Quicktime Pro a bit, tried it, and it worked. The solution does require that you have Quicktime Pro. Open both the exported audio and video files and with the audio file in front, choose Extract Tracks from the Edit Menu. Choose the only listed audio track, click Extract.

This will create a new window with the extracted audio. Ignore it and bring the video track to the front and choose Add Scaled from the edit menu and save. Viola! Your keynote quicktime video, intact with audio and video, looking as good as it did in keynote and ready to be imported into your iDVD project.

[robg adds: Based on my experience with Keynote2, I believe you'll only get the separate audio and video tracks when you've used the "audio well" in the Documents inspector to add your music as a background track that repeats through the duration of the show. If you have music that's just playing on one slide (i.e. it was placed directly on the slide), then you'll get a combined audio/video export. I also think, though I'm not positive, that the artifacts in iMovie are a result of it being limited to DV resolution, hence it scales the QT movie to 720x480.]
    •    
  • Currently 3.67 / 5
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  (3 votes cast)
 
[11,931 views]  

Combine Keynote2 audio/video tracks via QuickTime Pro | 1 comments | Create New Account
Click here to return to the 'Combine Keynote2 audio/video tracks via QuickTime Pro' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Combine Keynote2 audio/video tracks via QuickTime Pro
Authored by: enentrup on Mar 10, '05 09:57:43AM
Interesting! I was just working on a similar workflow, but taking a presentation OUT of Keynote to Final Cut Pro.

I found I could: Export>Quicktime>Custom and then choose 720x480 with the Apple DV/DVCPro NTSC Codec. I set my frame rate to 29.97fps and brought the finished file into FCP. It looked RAZOR sharp, but there was distortion because of the square vs. rectangle pixel consideration I failed to take into account. I did it again 720x540 (I think, but that doesn't sound right), and it was much better. Of course you can fix this in FCP too.

The problem, however, was that I noticed what seemed like an errant frame rate on playback viewed on my NTSC monitor. Sure enough, the file was at 28 fps and NOT 29.97. Hmmm... This stumped me. On subsequent attempts, the same thing: select 29.97 and end up with 28. It's nearly imperceptible, but I KNOW it's there and I don't want to let that sit there unfixed. Anyhow, in a pinch, I know it works well enough and can now look towards using Keynote presentations in Final Cut Pro projects for appropriate needs.

[ Reply to This | # ]