Created by the folks from growingleaders.com we present to you:

Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL

Click here to view Mac 101: Using Keynote as Motion in a bind

This brings up a tip that wasn’t posted in the TUAW article…exporting Keynote animations with an alpha channel (transparency).

The basic steps are:

1. Set all your slides to a background of NONE on the Slide Inspector-Appearance tab. The slides will look white, but Keynote knows they’ve been set to NONE.
2. Choose Export from the File Menu
3. Click the Quicktime icon in the export panel
4. Check the User Transparency option
5. In the format drop-menu choose Custom
6. Set your desired video size and click the Settings… button
7. For Compression type, choose either Animation or PNG (these are the only codecs that support transparency at the moment)
8. Set the frame rate high (like 30 or 60 fps), or set it to match your video editing frame rate (you may want to try it both ways to see which works best)
9. Set the Key frames to All – this will make sure none of the animations get mangled during export (this is a good trick even if you’re not using transparency)
10. IMPORTANT! Set the Depth to Millions of Colors+. It’s that + that makes sure the transparency gets exported. If you miss this step you won’t get a transparent video.
11. Slide the Quality to Best
12. Click Okay
13. Choose your Audio settings
14. Click Next
15. Name and save your movie

You should now have a movie with an embedded alpha channel that works in most video apps (such as Motion or Final Cut Pro). This trick has all kinds of great uses, and we thought it would be good to add to the TUAW post since it’s likely someone is going to ask about it (since Motion can export transparency easily).

have fun!

Macworld has more info on the new features (and some great screen shots). Click hear to read the Macworld story.

Or help us out and use one of these affiliate links to buy one of the iWork apps:

Get Keynote from iTunes
Get Pages from iTunes
Get Numbers from iTunes

The first video example is a mini cartoon of the Bible story of Jonah. We wish he’d gone into a bit more detail on how this one was made and animated (maybe he’ll post another blog entry with better details?), but if you’re looking for inspiration, this blog will certainly help.

Several of the other examples have some tips on what was done to make what you’re seeing, so overall the article is well worth the read.

You can find it here:
How to Animate with Keynote

Special thanks to Les Posen for pointing this article out to the Keynote yahoo group where I spotted it.

The file (at the point when we downloaded and opened it) contains 7 slides, with items such as the unlock screen, the home screen, the onscreen keyboard, various interface elements and even a page of instructions. The amount of interface elements is pretty large for a freebie, so you might want to send Aleks an email thanking him for his hard work.

You can download the file here, as well as read a bit about why he created it.

Here’s what we’ve got:

• Macworld’s first look at iWork for the iPad
• TUAW Real-lilfe iPad: Presenting with an iPad, Keynote and VGA connector
• Apple’s iPad in Business page
• Apple’s iPad discussion page (includes links to Keynote for iPad)
• Apple’s iPad Guided Tours page (check out the Keynote video)
• Apple’s Keynote for iPad sales page
• Apple’s Keynote for iPad FAQ (includes lists of available fonts, effects, etc)

Feel free to add links or questions in the comments of this article for others to gain from.

Click here to read “TUAW Tip: Video playback through Keynote transitions”

On a side note, we’ve done something similar in the past by actually taking a Keynote movie into Final Cut Pro and adding fancy transitions in that, then exporting the movie and placing that on a Keynote slide. It’s makes for some crazy effects, but it’s a heck of a lot of work. This tip is a much better technique since all it requires is taking a picture of the next slide in its starting state.

Check out the video on the PixelCorp.com

Here’s a a list of things that were noticed (with links to downloadable clips that jump right to that section of the presentation… you must be connected to the internet to stream the clips).

Lens Flare build — download movie
It’s like the Comet build in that it zooms across the screen and will likely have the same Right to Left and Left to Right build direction settings.

Points of Light build — download movie
It’s a little like the very end of the Shimmer effect where the white spots pop in just before it’s finished. Remove everything but those white spots, then make the white spots larger, and you get this build. Will likely have a directional component (left, right, up, down) unlike Shimmer.

3D Swoosh build — download movie
This build was used on a 3D chart. It looks like the same sort of action used in the current Swoosh build, only in 3D.

New Flip — download movie
In this build, the text flipped then hung, one after another. While this COULD have direction options, it’d look really strange flipping upward (much like the Fall transition didn’t have a fall UP) or left and right. The options on this one may be limited to by character, by word, by paragraph and by object.

Here’s a couple more that COULD be new, variants of current transitions, or very meticulous presentation creation.

Letter Shift — download movie
You’ll see in this one that certain letters and numbers stay and become a part of the next word or number. This would be great to see as a new build, but it could also be dissolves combined with motion paths.

NEW Old Flip — download movie
This is most likely the current Flip Smart Build with the Scale set to 100%. There’s also a way to recreate this using the regular Flip transition, but you have to use a Shape with the build set to “by Letter”.

Pie Slide — download movie
When analyzing another version of Keynote S, we saw grouped pie slices. Those were indeed “neat” but they could be done by using Preview and some creative cropping. This time, we see pie slices dissolving from nothing and building in to join the other slices. This also might be done with motion paths and cropping out separate slices of a pie chart if it wasn’t for this part.

download movie

Here, you’ve got the final slice from Microsoft moving in. The other slices built in front of the large iPod slice. If these were 2D fakes, the iPod piece would be under Other and Other would be under Sandisk. But, when Microsoft comes in, it’s in front of Sandisk as expected but behind iPod. If Sandisk is two layers over iPod and Microsoft three layers over iPod, Microsoft can’t also be behind iPod. However, since the only part that goes behind iPod is the dark orange shading, this could be two separate masked objects building in together, one in front of Sandisk, the other behind iPod. I’m crossing my fingers that it’s another new feature.

When Steve wants a new transition or build to show off new products during his presentations, we benefit in two ways. One, those features usually end up in a shipping version of iWork somewhere down the road and two, they make sure the cameras get a good shot of the screen during those parts of the presentation so we get a sneak peak at the current state of Keynote S!

Taking this a bit further, we’ve also posted a very nice way to smoothly utilize Keynote and Front Row which makes for a very slick way to incorporate iLife media with Keynote.

Here’s the link:
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/06/04/keynote_kungfu.html

Click here for Kirk’s blog entry on using Keynote.