By Ken Drake
12/30/03

Using Keynote to produce a Quicktime movie is an impressive way of showing off both your skills AND your Mac. But, let's face it, the default way of saving Keynote produced Quicktime movies in version 1.1.1 (just a title bar with your presentation below) lacks a certain something. Even if you have Quicktime pro and change the controller from None to Movie, it's still just plain and ordinary; nowhere near the uniqueness of your presentation.

If you've heard of media skins, maybe you've considered creating something like that to make your own email/CD delivered presentations special but didn't know where to start with them. Well, not only will this tutorial show you how to create files for a media skin, but, using LiveMotion, the resulting skin will be animated!

Export your Movie
In this example, we'll use a Keynote exported QuickTIme movie that is 400x300. Any size should work, as long as you remember that the skin will add size to your final movie. Also, the codec you choose shouldn't matter. This example uses Mpeg4, but Sorenson should work fine.

Setup your LiveMotion document
Now, let's open LiveMotion and start creating the skin. Choose "New Composition" from the "File" menu (or press Command-N). The dimensions of the file should be at LEAST as large as your movie but can be as big as you want it to be. In this tutorial, we'll create a file that's 410 pixels wide and 350 pixels high. This will give us a nice border plus an area to play around with.

You'll also want to make your export window look like the left image below, being sure to uncheck the two leftmost icons under the Macromedia Flash pop-up menu. These create a statistics report and an html file that you won't need for this tutorial. You can also change the Frame Rate here to 30. Also, at this time, click the T icon and choose "Full set" from the Embed Fonts pop-up. This way, your file will look the same regardless of the fonts the person vewing it has installed.

Adjust the Background
Next, let's make sure that our foreground/background colors are black/white respectively.

If the color above isn't black on the foreground square and white on the background square, click in the forground square (the one without the bar across the top) and then change the color to 100% black. It should look like this if you've done it correctly:

Save your work
Save this file as mediaskin.liv

Create the Mask
The first part of the media skin we're going to create is the window mask. For this tutorial we're going to make it relatively simple just to show how easy it is. You can go back later, make a few changes to the files and just re-run the script once you get the hang of it.

To create the window mask file, click on the rectangle tool then create a rectangle:

In the transform tab, change it's dimensions to be equal to the size of the document (in this case 410 x 350), and change the X and Y to 0. If you did it right, your entire document should appear to be black.

Next, change the export settings to look like this, being sure to uncheck the html export button and decrease the colors to two.

Export the Mask
Choose "Export As" from the "File" menu (or press Shift-Command-E) and save the file as windowmask.png

Create the Drag mask
Next, we'll create the dragmask. To do this we'll need to define a white area where the movie will play. The remaining black area becomes the drag mask. Create a new black rectangle by clicking the rectangle tool and clicking and dragging in the window.

Back in the color window, click on the foreground square and then click the color white. It should look like this:

If you're successful, your back rectangle should turn white:

Now enter the following numbers for it in the transform tab.

Of course, the only settings that are REQUIRED are the width and height. The X and Y are completely up to you and you're even free to manually place the white rectangle where you want it to be. No matter where you put it, though, make a note of the X and Y coordinates, as you'll need these later.

Export the Dragmask
Double-check your export settings to make sure they're still as they were when you exported earlier, and export this time as dragmask.png

Create the Media Skin
Now let's create a nice media skin. We'll start with the frame. Select the front and back rectangles by clicking the outer black area of the document, holding down shift and clicking the smaller white area. Now select Object>Combine>Minus Front so that we can apply the effect to the frame only. LiveMotion comes with a selection of styles, some are shown below. With the frame selected, double click on the 02_Mercury style to appy it to the frame.

Your result should look something like this:

Change your export settings back to the swf settings and Save the document.

Create the Animation
Now for the animated part. Choose a font of your liking, adjust the size so that it fits in the gray area at the bottom of your document, and type "Produced with Keynote and Quicktime" or any other text you can fit in the area.

LiveMotion also comes with some animated styles. Once you have the text where you want it to stop, select the text and double-click 11_Anim SpeedFromLeft from the Style palette.

That was the automatic part. Now we're going to do some hand tweaking to make the effect complete. We'll start by pressing Command-T to open the Timeline/Composition window.

First we're going to make a couple of changes to make our animation repeat and make it repeat regardless of the Quicktime movie's timeline. We're going to make our animated part a Time Independant Group. To do this, select your animated text in the composition window (in my case it's called "Blue Produced with Keynot")

and choose Make Movie Clip Group from the Object menu. That will make two changes. The name of your animation objects changes from what it was ("Blue Produced with Keynot") to "Group of nn objects" (mine changed to Group of 1 objects). Then, making sure that the Group you just created is selected, under the Timeline menu, choose Loop.

Yours should now look similar to the below.

Now we're going to concentrate on editing the Group. Double-click on the Group to open up it's own timeline. Then using the disclosure triangles, you should view your animation the following way.

Click on the endpoint for Group of 1 objects and drag it out to 07s. Next, move the time selection pointer to 4s. Again, making sure your text object is selected, click the square to the right of "Object Opacity" to set a keyframe. Move the time slider to 5s and, in the opacity tab, change it to zero.

Your timeline should look like this

Save your Skin
Save the document now and then export as mediaskin.swf

Adjusting the skin in QuickTime
The flash file that is created by LiveMotion will have more frames than you need. Since this animation is time independant, all we really need for the motion media skin is one frame. You'll fix this using Quicktime Pro. Open the file, drag the right selection triangle until you get to the first non-blank frame, then press delete. Now you should have a movie with your animation starting in the first frame. Drag the right selection triangle ONE frame, copy (Command-C), open a new Quicktime document (Command-N) then paste what you copied (Command-V). You'll want to save this as a self-contained movie named mediaskin.mov. There you go, media skin complete!

Download some Apple tools
Now, let's go get the tools supplied by Apple from http://www.apple.com/applescript/quicktime/. You can only download the whole set, but the only ones you need for this excercise is the media skin droplets. Inside the Media Skin Droplets folder is a folder labeled "240 x 180 Aluminum." This is the only folder you will need. Take the windowmask.png, dragmask.png, mediaskin.mov documents and the original movie you created and drag them into this folder.

Adjust the droplet settings
Now we need to set the preferences for the droplet. Double-click on the droplet and set the preferences as follows:

We haven't mentioned the Video Offset Horz and Video Offset Vert. These are the numbers you made a note of earlier (in this case, 5 and 5). Also, make sure to set Overlay Media Skin, Auto Play and Auto Close to NO.

Now, take the presentation file your exported from Keynote at the beginning of this tutorial and just drop it onto the droplet. It tells you what's going on in each step and even shows on the screen what it's doing. Voila! Bask in the glory of your own personalized quicktime presentation! Share it with your friends!

Click to play final movie in the QuickTime Player

Conclusion
This was a very basic intro to the animated side of media skins. However, now that you have these steps, you can create any shapes you want. A word of advice...try to stay away from extremely curvy skins. Since the window mask is not antialiased, those curved edges will look jagged.

It's also possible to create QT skins with Macromedia Fireworks using this technique. We may post an alternate tutorial for Fireworks in the future, but if you're handy with Fireworks, you can probably get a decent skin made with it.