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Keynote, iDVD and the messy results…
Posted by | Posted in Blog | Posted on 06-01-2006
When Apple added DVD export to Keynote 3, I was happy to see the new feature. In the past, when I’d ask the Apple people at Macworld why Keynote didn’t have this, they mentioned that the quality would be so bad (going from computer screen to tv screen) that people would complain. I thought that was a lame excuse, but judging by my tests today, they might have been right.
The problem isn’t one of quality exactly as much as it is one of the nature of DVD playback. You see, the best solution for a clickable DVD is to add chapter stops in the DVD track. Each time the slide needs to stop and wait for the operator, it pauses. This is all fine and dandy except that on my two DVD players, connected to standard NTSC (non high def) TVs, when the DVD goes into a pause, it looks like complete crap. Text gets all splotchy, and the whole screen jitters.
At first I thought it was an issue of color. Normally you never want pure white on a tv screen (actually, there are all kinds of colors you don’t want on tv, but for now we’ll stick to pure white). When you use a color that’s really not set for tv, you usually get bleeding or flickering or all kinds of weird things (like bending in your images). So, as another test I changed my text to 10% black. This gave me better results, with much less bleed and a bit less flicker. But the splotchy text was still there.
Then I watched closely on the transitions and realized my text was beautiful! This made me think about the times I’ve made still menus for DVD Studio Pro out of actual movies that just LOOKED still. This always gave me better quality. It was at this point I realized that Apple was actually pausing the dvd (it just hadn’t clicked till then). They really had no choice, other than rigging up some weird sequence of looping menus or looping video tracks (making a huge mess under the hood).
So there you have it. In most cases (unless you have some amazing dvd player that can do a pause without lowering the quality) if you’re making a presentation DVD that you plan on manually advancing, you’re going to see lousy slides in between beautiful animations and transitions. If you’re making a self playing video, then you’re fine as it’s just going to play from beginning to end with no pauses.
All of these issues make me wish I had an HD tv and Blue-ray burner/player just to see if the new HD spec will have better pausing results than the current DVD spec. My guess it it’ll be night and day, but time will tell.
I’m going to add a tip on the end here as I only just learned it in my tests: If you want to export your presentation as close to the regular DVD size as you can, do NOT use 640×480, use 720×540. I tried 640×480 as my presentation size first and got a 720×540 movie with black on the right side and bottom. Keynote apparently wants you to use 720×540 or higher and won’t scale anything smaller up to fit that size.
I haven’t tried this (yet), but I think that I understand what may be going on. NTSC (North American/Japanese) video runs at 30 frames per second (29.97, if you want to be picky) and is composed of 525 lines that create the image. Each frame is composed of two fields of half the number of lines. If you freeze a frame (two fields), you may see what looks like jittering as image shifts between fields. This is especially true if there is any motion going on. With video production equipment, you usually have the option to freeze a whole frame or just a field. The effect that you’re describing sounds like a frame has been frozen instead of a field.
All of the above may not make any difference in your efforts to solve the problem, but may be of interest to the curious.
It doesn’t jitter, it just looks bad, but you’re most likely right, it’s an interlacing issue. I have yet to try using a laptop or high end dvd/tv setup to see if I get different results.
I have had great success with keynote out to DVD as far as the qulaity go BUT I am having trouble with the click advance function when played on a dvd player. On some slides it works fine (static pages) anything with a QT movie or sound byte cuts the sound or movie off a split second before the end. At which point inorder to advance to the next page – you must click the forward button twice.
I am finding that the click settings are irratic… Very frustrating.
Have you run into this? Does anyone have a solution?
I have tried opening the QT file and experimented WITH EVERY possible setting combo in QT. But no luck.
So…I’m thinking of creating a slideshow with photo and the music is tightly synchronized to the photos on keynote. If I dvd the slideshow…how good are the photos…any degradation?
What about the timing of pics to music…will the timing be retained?
No. the timing will not be preserved (if you are using specific timing for slides). The export to Quicktime (the intermediate step needed to go to iDVD) has only fixed numbers for each slide and transition. It may time OK, or may not, You may need to try it, tweak the numbers and try again.
I am using Keynote 4 and iDVD 6 and can’t get a presentation to manually advance. In iDVD preview it works (sort of) and then in DVD player it does not. Plays without stopping. I have tried exporting to QuickTime from Keynote and using “send to” iDVD from Keynote. Using stills and making a slideshow in iDVD is not what I need. Many of my slides contain QuickTime movies. I deliver the presentations to Windows users in .mov format, but playback performance is OK at best depending on the machine. I want to use DVDs so that PC users get smooth video playback regardless of PC hardware. It works except for the manual advance of slides. iDVD seems to support manual advance of Keynote slides. It just doesn’t work. Am I missing something?