Exporting Files from Keynote

Last Update: February 12, 2004-NOTE: THIS IS A REALLY OLD PAGE AND IN DIRE NEED OF UPDATING

I wanted to see what I could get out of Keynote's QuickTime export. The first file below is MY test using Cleaner 6. The second shows that Apple uses a few tricks to get the size down and unless you need a really small file, you won't need an extra compression tool at all.

My Test using Cleaner 6
I exported the sample presentation from keynote using the Animation codec (no loss of quality), then exported it again from the QuickTime player at 15fps. Apple uses a trick to save file space by dropping the frame rate to zero for still images. It works great, but Cleaner 6 doesn't understand it and messes up the file, so I had to pass it through the QT Pro player to "fix" it. So, after I had a TRUE 15fps file exported from the QT Player I dropped it into Cleaner 6 and processed it with Sorenson Pro 3 using 2-pass Variable Bit rate encoding. I set the bit rate to 200kbits/sec, and I turned on sharpen. The result took over an hour and looks pretty good. It's about 5.2 meg.

View my 15 FPS Cleaner 6 Processed Sample (5.2 meg)

My Test using just the Keynote Defaults
For this one I used Apple's standard Medium QT export setting right out of Keynote and tried again. It defaults to 400X300 (half the 800X600 original) at 12fps. Again, that frame rate is not really true as Apple uses a trick to save file space. Boy does it. You can see that this file is larger in size than mine, but it is only 1.4 meg in size. It's not as sharp, but it sure beats an hour or two of compression with a codec that costs several hundred dollars running inside a program that costs several hundred also. This file took only a few minutes to create.

View Apple's 12 FPS Sample right from Keynote (1.4 meg)

The 800X600 version of this looks JUST like the original, but I won't post it since it weighs in at 27.7 meg. What I am saying is that I trust Apple's export settings.

FULL SCREEN PLAYBACK TIP:

I was also able to use Cleaner 6 to create a movie that opens in full screen mode, but with the actual video playing at 100% so that in case the screen is big, the movie doesn't look fuzzy. It works very well, and if I have to give presentations to windows users this is how I'll do it. I set all the settings in Cleaner to "Copy" so that my frame rates didn't get messed up and it worked perfectly.

iDVD TIP:

If you wish to have a self running movie for dropping into iDVD, I suggest using the Animation Codec, and setting the frame rate to 29.97. Also, set the size to 640X480. Other's have suggest 720X540, but my copy of iDVD didn't like that size. Try both sizes and see which works. If you are making a custom presentation, I suggest you make it the exact size you want to export at (in this case 640x480) as scaling will sometimes mess up your transparent images. If you can't start at 640x480, then I'd use 800x600 as you'll get less scaling from that. If you don't have lots of thin lines on your slides, you'll probably find that even 1024x768 works fine as a starting point in Keynote. Then export the finished presentation at 640x480 as mentioned above.

Once in iDVD you'll find that using 640X480 will mess up thin vertical lines on your screen, and using 720X540 will mess up fine horizontal lines. There's no way around this as iDVD must convert your movie to 720X480 and starting with that in Keynote will give you a show with black bars on each side during export (it will also mess up the aspect ration and things will look stretched or squished in iDVD).

In my tests. the preview in iDVD looked JUST like my original. Also, using the Animation codec saves you from losing quality BEFORE you even get to iDVD. To save hard drive space you can also try it with Apple's High Quality export and see how it looks. You'll also want to make sure that when you export your clips you make them auto-advancing and NOT interactive or things could get messy in iDVD.

CHURCH PROJECTION TIP:

Here's something very cool for SundayPlus or ProPresenter users. Create your announcement loop or Sermon notes in Keynote. Save the announcements as a self running QuickTime movie, and the sermon notes as an interactive QuickTime movie. Drop these into your presentation program and use them just like normal video files. With the sermon notes, just continue to hit your Play button to move to the next slide. After testing this I have finally stopped asking for PowerPoint compatibility in SundayPlus.

One last important note: I have had trouble exporting QT movies from Keynote on my G4. Sometimes they work fine, and sometimes the transitions and builds "stick" and don't finish until the movie is advanced to the next build. I was able to get around it by using my iBook to save the file, but I hope this is something Apple gets to the bottom of or it could render the QT export functions useless for some people. UPDATE: This is a problem with SOME versions of the Sorenson Pro codec being installed. If you are having this problem and you have the Sorenson Pro codec installed in your system, you may want to remove it temporarily so that you can export movies properly. The latest update to the Codec might have fixed this problem.

See our new Tutorial on Exporting to PowerPoint

Oh boy, where do I start. Another Keynote user clued me in to a few things about PDF exporting, and I did a little of my own testing as a result.

There are TWO ways to export as a PDF:

Export:PDF
This one has NO options. What you get is a file probably slightly larger than the .Key file you started with. Apple doesn't resample anything, and none of your masked photos are cropped. The benefit is that you could bring this into a PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat and modify it. The drawback is that this makes for larger files.

Print: Save as PDF
This option lets you choose to show your builds, but it has its problems too. Using the Print to PDF option makes for a HUGE file size. I printed a 9 meg show with builds and it came in at 67.4 meg. Printing a PDF does at least give you some options, such as making dark backgrounds white and adding a border.

Problems
Making a PDF from Keynote has its problems. Bloated files are only a part of that.

Image Glitches: Many slides will come out with small white dots on them. I found that this was usually tied to a particular image, but not always. Also, some objects will just look bad. I had bullets that looked all rough edged, and one large circle had a small square attached to it that had never been there before. UPDATE: Apple fixed this with an update. If you're using 1.1 or higher you should be okay.

Compositing Glitches: Transparency will be lost, and if you made a nice light watermark on a page, it will come out full strength, making your page look terrible. Drop shadows are also tossed out. The work around is to add shadows and transparency to your images BEFORE bringing them into Keynote. Photoshop or Fireworks can do this properly.

Sizing Glitches: With the Print to PDF option, I also noticed that since the slides weren't filling the PDF page, objects that ran off the edge of my slide would show up in their entirety instead of being cropped. I tried my best to get the output to go full page. I even made a custom page size of 14.22x10.66 (1024X768 at 72dpi) and it still prints in the center of the page. I will do more testing to see if there is some "sweet spot" that we can use. Export to PDF didn't have this problem.

Knowing what things the PDF spec supports, I HOPE Apple will fix these problems in the next version. There is not reason for no transparency, no shadows, and those annoying white dots.

PDF SIZE TIP:

Many people are using a special compression program to reduce the size of their PDFs. It's called PDFShrink (there's also a lite version) by Apago. This program lets you set compression settings and then just drop your PDF files on it. I used PDFShrink Lite and was able to get my 64 meg file down to 1.7 meg. The images were a bit blurry, but I didn't play with it much. UPDATE: Later updates to Keynote 1 fixed this size problem to a certain extent. PDF files are MUCH smaller than they were with version 1.0