So, how can you make the videos you create in iMovie more engaging? Well in
this video I'm going to show you a way to spice up your iMovie projects using
graphics from Apple Keynote.
Hey it's Mike with more tips and tools to help
you create engaging educational video, and if it's your first time here make
sure you hit the big subscribe button and don't forget to click the bell icon
so you don't miss a thing. You know, iMovie is a fairly capable,
low-cost video editing application that covers the basics. You get cuts and other
transitions, you get on-screen text, multiple tracks to work with, video
effects and some fairly decent audio tools. But iMovie is very limited when it
comes to graphics, especially if you want to overlay graphics on top of your video.
Now iMovie does come with on-screen text overlays, like titles and lower thirds
but they're very limited. Luckily there is an effective, low-cost, easy to use
solution to this problem and that solution is Apple Keynote, the
presentation software that comes bundled along with iMovie when you purchase a
new Mac. But if you've watched any of my Keynote tutorials you know it's way more
than just presentation software. Apple Keynote is a graphics and animation
powerhouse. But what's really exciting is the fact that you can export your
Keynote graphics and bring them into your iMovie project. This opens up a
whole world of possibilities when it comes to creating your iMovie videos. I'm
gonna hop into the computer right now and show you a couple of ways to bring
your Keynote graphics into your iMovie projects. So here we are in Apple Keynote.
This is version 7.3 and I have this slide here that I want to use in my
iMovie project. So the first thing I'm going to do is export this graphic out
of Keynote. To do that I'm going to go up to File
and select Export To and select Images. You get this export dialog with the
Images tab selected. You can choose to export all of the slides in your
presentation or select specific slides or a range of slides. I'm just going to
select my one example slide and it's the first slide so I'll input 1 of 1 in
the entry fields. We'll skip over the Create an image for each stage of builds
option and move to the Format options under this drop down menu. Now you have a
few choices here. You've got the default which is a JPEG High Quality, you have
JPEG Smaller File Size, PNG and TIFF. So which one do you pick? Well, any of these
will work for me but when I'm creating video I like to preserve as much quality
as possible with my files before I have to compress and export my final video. I
try to avoid compressing media files and then having to compress them again when
I export my final video. So having said all of that I'm going to select the TIFF
format. TIFF is an uncompressed format, so it will preserve the maximum quality of
my graphic. And the TIFF format can be imported by iMovie which is obviously
important. Keep in mind because the TIFF format is uncompressed your file size
will be larger than these other compressed formats.
So if file size is an issue for you then I suggest selecting PNG. PNG is a widely
accepted format that uses what's called "lossless" compression which is way more
forgiving than JPEG compression. The PNG format is easily imported into iMovie as well.
So, I'm going to select TIFF, hit Next and
I'll find a place to save the exported file
and hit Export. Let's hop over to iMovie.
I've created this demo project with this video clip on the timeline and now I
want to bring in the TIFF file I exported out of Keynote so I'm going to
bring up my Finder window and grab that file. Here's little gotcha that might
trip you up. When Keynote exports slides it first creates a folder with the same
name as the file you exported and places the actual file inside that folder. So, if
you're frantically looking for the file you exported, first look for a folder
with the same name. So here's the folder Keynote exported. I'll double click it to
open it and there's my file. To bring my file into iMovie I'll simply drag and
drop it into this event I created just to keep things organized. Then I'll
select the file again and drag and drop it onto my timeline. And there's our
graphic from Keynote. It looks pretty good and it acts just like any other
media clip, so you can drag it along the timeline, you can drag its ends to
stretch it out, you could split this video clip down here and drag and drop
the graphic clip in between the two clips, all kinds of stuff. Now let's say
we want to overlay a graphic on top of our video here in iMovie. Well let's hop
back into Keynote and I'll show you what I'm talking about.
I'm going to select my second slide here in Keynote. So, I have this Earth graphic
and I want to overlay this graphic on top of my video in iMovie as an
over-the-shoulder graphic like you see on news shows.
Well, to do that we need to do two things. The first thing we need to do is make
the background of this slide transparent because we want our video in iMovie to
show through this empty area. To make the background of this slide transparent we
need to remove it. So, making sure we're in Format mode at
the top of the interface here I'm going to make sure nothing on the slide is
selected by clicking off of it that brings up the Slide Layout panel and
down below here you'll see the Background settings for the slide. This
particular slide's background is a Color Fill of black. To remove this background
I'm going to click on the Color Fill drop-down and select No Fill. The
background of this slide is now empty. Now, even though the background still
looks black on the slide I know the background is empty because of this red
slash symbol over here, so make sure you see that. Now that we've removed the
background we go on to step two and that is to export our slide. So, again we'll go
up to File and select Export To and select Images. Now we only want to export
our second slide so I'll enter 2 of 2 in the entry fields.
Now, the format we select is important because only certain file formats
support transparency. Remember, we want this area of our graphic to be
transparent, so the underlying video can show through. There are only two formats
in this list that can contain transparency information or what's known
as an Alpha Channel and those formats are PNG and TIFF.
If you select JPEG and export to iMovie your graphic will appear with a white
opaque background, there will be no transparency. So, to retain that
transparency information as well as maximum quality I'm going to again
select TIFF. Again if file size is an issue for you
select PNG, it works perfectly fine. So, I'll select TIFF, hit Next and I'll find
a place to save the exported file and hit Export. Back over in iMovie I'll
bring up my Finder window and grab the file I just exported from Keynote. And
I'll do that by again double-clicking on the folder with the file name. I'll
select the file and drag and drop it into the event where I'm collecting the
media for this project. Then I'll drag and drop my imported graphic into my
timeline, and there you can see iMovie reads the transparency information
contained in our TIFF file and removes the background of our graphic to let the
underlying video show through. This technique really opens up a lot of
possibilities for including graphics in your iMovie projects. Here's a bonus tip
for working with graphics in iMovie. Let's say we aren't happy with the
placement of this earth graphic in the frame, you know, we want to adjust it.
Well, you could go back into Keynote and adjust it there and then re-export it
and bring it back into iMovie. Or, you can adjust it right here in
iMovie. To do that you select the graphics clip on the timeline. And then
notice up here, above the playback window, we have this toolbar. The icon we're
interested in is this one here, Video Overlay Settings. Click that and we get
all these additional settings. Here's the one we want.
This setting tells us that our graphic clip is in Cutaway mode, meaning, it's
just like any other video clip that sits on top of the main timeline.
It's a cutaway, we can move it back and forth along the timeline, but we can't
adjust its position inside the window, here, as you can see. But if we click the
Cutaway button we get a drop-down with other modes to choose from
what we want is Picture In Picture. You notice what happened our graphic. It shrunk.
Well, don't be alarmed, we can scale it back up by clicking and dragging these
blue corner handles. And if we hover our cursor over top of the graphic, we get
this four-arrow icon on our cursor which means we can click and drag our graphic
around the frame to place it where we want to.
And if you're not happy with your adjustments and you want to reset the
graphic, you can simply go back up to the mode drop-down and select Cutaway again,
and your graphic returns to its original size and orientation when you brought it
into iMovie. A handy little technique for working with graphics in iMovie. So, as
you can see using graphics from Keynote inside of your iMovie project is pretty
simple to do. The key is to remember to select the correct format when you're
exporting your graphics out of Keynote. Now I tell you, the combination of
Keynote and iMovie provides a remarkably flexible and low-cost workflow for
creating high quality video. Which brings us to the end of this video. I hope you
found value in it. And if you want to continue to learn simple, cost-effective
ways to create video that engages persuades and educates your audience,
then don't forget to hit that subscribe button, so you don't miss a thing.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.