ScreenCastsOnline: Timelines in Keynote

August 15, 2008 | 9 min 18 sec

Don McAllister demonstrates how to present timelines using Bee Docs Timeline together with Apple's Keynote in this excerpt from ScreenCastsOnline episode SCO0162.

Transcript:

— ScreenCastsOnline HD
— Getting the most out of your Mac

Bee Docs Timeline Keynote Integration

— This is a small segment of a full Bee Docs Timeline tutorial (SCO0162) available from www.ScreenCastsOnline.com

Now, whilst in itself the 3D presentation is very effective I needed a little bit more, I needed to integrate it into Keynote. Now there are two ways you can integrate into Keynote. You can export to Keynote and that will allow you to create—as I said before—a presentation with a slide for every event. But I really wanted to keep the animation and sort of move from event to event using the animation facilities and then also supplement the timeline presentation with some additional slides, additional bullet points, etc.

So, what I did—if I just cancel this now—was to go File > Export 3D and then Export as a QuickTime Movie. Now you can export full HD 720p quality. What I’d suggest is you up the event duration to something like 10 seconds and then just hit Next. Decide where you want to save it and then save the 3D timeline. And what will happen now is that it will actually render out a full QuickTime movie and each event will be a separate chapter mark.

So, let me just show you the final movie that I rendered out from Timeline 3D. So this is the actual QuickTime movie that I’ll be using in the presentation. So let’s just do an enter full screen. And as you can see, I’ve added the background back in but completely hands off now. It’s a full movie. It will just take us through each transition, go to each event within the specified time.

Now, I’ve set this I think for two seconds delay rather than ten seconds but in hind sight, ten seconds is probably better if you’re going to integrate this into a QuickTime presentation, but as you can see it goes through each event.

But, what I really want to do is stop it at each event and then add some additional slides in as well. Now the way I’ve done that is to incorporate the QuickTime movie into Keynote. So let me show you how to do that.

Now this is the Keynote file that I’ve created to deliver the presentation. It’s still a work in progress but we’re nearly there. As you can see there’s some standard Keynote slides for the first part of the presentation and then when we get to slide #7 and onward I actually start to incorporate the timeline—the 3D timeline—from Bee Docs Timeline.

Let me just show you what it looks like. This is slide #10 and as you can see as well as the timeline, I’ve added in some additional panels in Keynote and also some bullet points to help me through the presentation. And just to show you what it looks like—before I show you how I put it all together—let’s just play from this slide.

So, the movie will just automatically kick off when the slide starts and takes us to the next point within the timeline and then I hit the spacebar, the panel pops up, we have a sparkle effect, and then the bullet points… For this particular one I can just hit spacebar to go through.

And when I’ve got to the end of that particular bullet point, the panel disappears and then the movie will carry on and move to the next point on the timeline and then again I can just pull up the panel with some additional points and talk through it. So, hopefully it’s going to be a very effective method of getting across the sort of chronology of ScreenCastsOnline.

Well anyway, let’s have a look at how I put it together and some quick tips on how you can do the same for your presentations. Now, if you’re not familiar with Keynote I really suggest you go and checkout episodes SCO0118 and episodes SCO0052 and they will give you some background as to how to do some of the builds and things that I’m going to show you now. Keynote itself is a fantastic application and it’s extremely powerful as well, especially its latest release.

So what I’ve done to start off the presentation—or rather the segment I am going to incorporate the timeline into—is just to create a slide with some effects on. Now you can see those effects by… Well basically we have a rectangle. Now this is just a rectangle I generated in OmniGraffle and dragged into the slide. If we go to the inspector and we have a look at the build in options… So, the first build is that the rectangle will flip in and then we have some text—this “Became a Podcast fan” at the moment—that will come in with a shimmer and then that will be followed by some lines of text which will come in automatically after the title and the other paragraphs will automatically follow as well.

And then to go out—let’s see there’s a build out—so the text / the title dissolves, the lines of text dissolve and then the rectangle itself flips out.

OK, so if you are not familiar with Keynote, that might sound a little bit complicated but once you’ve had a play with it, this is all fairly standard stuff and it’s quite easy to put together. So, that’s sort of like my building block, that’s my main slide that I want to use with a timeline. So let me just pop the inspector down.

Now, to get the timeline movie—and don’t forget this is a high definition movie, I’ve copied it to my desktop—I’m just going to drop it onto this slide. Now one thing to bear in mind is that these high definition movies can be quite large, I think this one is about 300 megabytes, but you normally only need one copy of the movie in your presentation. You don’t have to have multiple copies.

Now you can see here, I’ve dragged the movie in. I’m going to reposition it. I’ve found the optimum place for this particular one is—let’s see it’s 955 pixels by 360 and as you can see it’s overlapping on the rectangle so what I need to do is just push that to the back and there we go.

Right, now if I was to play this the whole movie itself would just start playing straight away and go right the way through so we need to find a way of stopping and starting at the points that we want to do. Now built into Keynote, within the inspector, if we go to the QuickTime options, you have a Start & Stop control. So you can control where the movie starts and where it stops.

So, what I’m going to do—I’m going to let it start—now for this first slide I want the first three points to appear and then I want it to stop when it says “Became a Podcast fan” and then for the block to flip in. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to move the out point, so where the movie stops playing—just skim right the way through—so it’s there “Became a Podcast fan” so I actually want it to stop there. OK, and basically that’s it.

So now if we play that, let’s see what happens. OK, so we have the 2D representation at the start of the movie and then we have the movie itself, and the first point, second point, and then it comes to the third point which is the point where I want it to stop. OK, so the movie actually stops there and then I click my control and there we go. The Keynote rectangle appears. OK and that’s fine.

OK, so that’s our first slide and if I hit the spacebar again that will go out and then the movie finishes because we’ve set a start and a stop point.

What we want to do now is to duplicate this slide so I’m going to say Duplicate and we’ve now got a second copy of this slide. Now the nice thing is it doesn’t make a second copy of the movie. It will just reference the same copy of the movie. What I want to do on this one is to change the start and stop position for the movie so if I click on the movie first…so I now want it to stop on the next point which is (I just drag along carefully, here we go) “Decided to Create a Mac Audio Podcast.” And I want it to start where we stopped last time which was (here we go) “Became a Podcast fan.”

OK, that fine. And then all I need to do now is just change this title here—so just to remind myself where it stopped—“Decided to Create a Mac Podcast.” OK, just some extra points. Now if you go back to the beginning and play…

Again our first slide, the movie starts, we get the first three points… I hit the spacebar, get the rectangle and title, points you want to talk about…spacebar again and the rectangle disappears and then it moves to the next point and stops. Spacebar again and there we go.

And to move onto the next point we just highlight this slide, duplicate it, create a new slide and then just move the start point and the end point of the movie using the inspector and just go through your presentation building that up. Now it’s a little bit fiddly but the results, I think, are really well worth the effort.

But that is how you can incorporate high definition movie of your timeline into Keynote!