As another year passes, I see another Completion Ceremony video firmly in my rearview mirror – a video that almost didn't happen due to schedule constraints. In all, the Keynote file that served as the project's base was 123 slides with some 240 photographs included. Five days before the ceremony, I only had about forty of those slides completed! It was nuts finishing up the rest, leading to many near-sleepless nights. Still, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out this year, so allow me to take a moment to look back at highlights as well as problems with this year's video.

Let's Start With the Bad News

The time crunch led to one major issue: no opportunities to troubleshoot or tweak. In the end, my soundtrack (composed by a friend and myself) was about thirty seconds shorter than the video. I had no time to write new material, so the video opens in silence. It only looks intentional! Additionally, framerate was an issue. I haven't had problems with this since my first attempt six years ago (using nothing but Keynote 1.0 and QuickTime Pro). Again, given just a few more hours, I know I could have worked this out.

I also felt limited in my adherence to Mac OS X 10.4 technologies. I really wanted to upgrade to 10.5 before working on this video (explaining some of my own procrastination), but it just didn't happen. This hampered my vision to some extent because some of the tools I wanted to use require 10.5 functionality. I still think the video presentation was pretty good. It just wasn't what I had in mind.

On to the Positives!

I ended up following a design philosophy (for lack of a better term) I used last year – that is all backgrounds and objects had to feel tangible and real. No swirly abstract PowerPoint-like backgrounds allowed! The end result is very organic looking, and both parents and kids have an easier time connecting to the static images.




I also used some extracted Keynote elements and Hemera Photo-Objects to add some more depth to the slides, adding small touches to compliment the images. These turned out to be a nice addition to the formula.

iMovie and iDVD worked like champs on my MacBook Pro – which I was grateful to have since the G5 didn't fare so well this year. We will not be replacing it this year, but the PowerMac is beginning to show its age. It produced seven DVDs to the MacBook's thirty, and two of those were coasters.

Covetous Desires for Next Year

• Photoshop Elements 6 - because switching computers just to use Photoshop is a pain.
• OS X 10.5 Leopard - because my favorite quick-and-dirty image editor has picked up some cool new features that rely on Leopard.
• Sibelius 5 - for the same reasons as PS Elements 6. Rosetta is not kind to previous versions of these apps.
• iWork '09 and iLife '09 - because…well, just because.

That's really it for this year. Except for the time crunch, everything went fairly smoothly and predictably. I look forward to trying to diving into this project next year around this time again!

Tags: keynote, iwork

Another year has past, and another memories DVD is finished for our outgoing fifth graders. This year's video project followed very much the same workflow as past years', and the entire process was very smooth.

The Good

The new MacBook Pro performed like a champ except for when I was overtaxing memory. I think it's already time to add a couple of gigs, but I only experienced one application (iDVD) hang throughout the entire process. Also, after burning 110 copies of the video, only one coaster was produced that I know of. Again, the results were good overall.

Keynote Pro's Barcelona theme and Keynote's own shape drawing capabilities came in handy. The drawing tools in Keynote enabled me to create "tabs" that helped make photographs in the video look mounted as if in a scrapbook. Barcelona helped create a very unique feel for the slides about a class trip, and I'll definitely be inclined to purchase additional themes from Keynote Pro in the future.

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Finally, Lemkesoft's GraphicConverter gave me a good alternative to PhotoShop Elements (which is not yet a Universal Binary for Intel Macs). I was impressed with this software overall, but I may still get a new copy of PS Elements whenever a Universal Binary is released.

The Less Than Good

I wanted to use a song our children recorded as the background music to the video, but the sound quality of the recording was so poor, it really wasn't an option. The only other complaint I have is that a second Keynote theme I purchased, called Rounded Corners by PagesUser, wasn't as useful as I had hoped. (Also, the purchasing experience was pretty poor.)

I also have to continually remind myself that the transitions Push Up, Push Down, Grid Left, and Grid Right do not export to video correctly and should be avoided when building the slideshow in Keynote.

Final Note

This year's project was done with the same versions of iWork and iLife as last year, so everything went about the same. The better hardware smoothed out the process, but this year was really a refinement of last year's techniques. Hopefully, new versions of iWork and iLife will come along about the same time as Leopard, and I'll have some new features to play with for next time.

If you want to see a more detailed description of how I put these slideshow videos together, read this post on my Simply Presentation page: From Keynote to iDVD.

Tags: technology, software

It's the last week of the school year, and things are insane. Here are some quick bits to keep you entertained until I can formulate a more substantial post.

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I just finished supporting one of our fourth grade teacher's movie-making project with her class. The children wrote, directed, and starred in their own production. A good time was had by all – except for us adults who had to piece everything together in the end!

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editing the film in iMovie & iDVD

On a related note, I'm also trying to finish up this year's fifth grade memories DVD. Even though I'm ahead of schedule compared to previous years, it still feels like this project will never be done! Throw a talent show into the mix, and things just get nutty!

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In totally unrelated news, I noticed that the most recent version of NeoOffice displays the correct "close" widget on unsaved documents! You might remember that I noted this as a flaw in my overview of NeoOffice earlier this year.




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Finally, this made me utter a hushed "woot!" of awe:



To paraphrase the cinematic trailer – it's about time, indeed.

Tags: work, video games, technology, neooffice

May is the long dark tea time of the soul around here, resulting in the site pretty much going dormant for a month. Well, that is all over, and it's time to write about this year's DVD created for our fifth grade's completion ceremony.

The Process

Just like last year, no souls were tortured with Microsoft products throughout the duration of this project. Well, that's not quite true. I tried to burn a photo CD at work, but the computer kept crashing mid-burn. I still think the paltry 256 MB of memory on those things is the root of all evil.

• All photographs of teachers and children were dumped into iPhoto where they were organized and enhanced. This year's school album contained over 600 images at one point.
• The slideshow of images was assembled in Keynote and exported as a QuickTime file.
• All music was handled by Sibelius 3.
• The children were recorded using Audio Hijack and organized in iTunes.
• Everything gets put together in iMovie.
• iDVD finished everything up.

The Good

iPhoto never missed a beat, and the new editing features (coupled with Keynote 3's image enhancement options) allowed me to entirely remove Photoshop Elements from my workflow. Furthermore, with all of my media being stored in iPhoto and iTunes, nothing was more than a click or two away thanks to the Media Browser built into all of Apple's iWork and iLife applications. Have I ever mentioned that I love Keynote?

Sibelius 3 worked very smoothly this time around. Christine's emotional melodies once again provided great inspiration, and I was able to create more original content to compliment her material.

iMovie HD was great to work in, and it saved my bacon too. (More on that later.) Finally, iDVD was as simple and intuitive as ever. The Drop Zones Editor was a great addition to the interface of that product.

The Scary

iDVD (surprise) did cause one scary moment when it repeatedly crashed while encoding audio. Fortunately, I went back to iMovie and saved the whole package as a self-contained QuickTime file. With that done, iDVD had no problem burning the final DVD.

Life Lessons

Again, I allowed things to get rushed because I wanted to include some school functions that were just a couple of days before the completion ceremony. Consequently, I couldn't finish up the music until I knew for sure how long the slides were going to last, and I allowed myself no time to account for major glitches like the one I experienced. Because of this, I had no copies of the DVD to sell at the completion ceremony, and I had to take orders instead.

Furthermore, music composition became a frenzied process at the end, and the music did not quite match the visuals. There is one particularly apparent moment of awkward silence where I ran out of music. Fortunately, I was able to correct this for the DVDs that parents will be receiving.

The moral of the story? I need to set a date I want everything compiled by so I can enter into the duplication process with less time pressure. The final step is always where things go wrong. As a result, this is where I need to allow myself the most time. Anything that falls after that date will just not be included in the DVD.

The Conclusion of the Matter

Overall, the DVD went well. There was one major snag, but it was easily resolved. Time is my biggest enemy every year, and I just need to realize that I do have control over that variable. I was my own worst obstacle when it came to time, so that's something I can learn to work around.

Product Links

Apple iLife – includes iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb.

Apple iWork – includes Keynote 3 and Pages 2.

Sibelius – great composition software. It's now up to version 4.

Audio Hijack Pro – nice little recording app.

Tags: work, macintosh

After 14 intensive hours of work, the DVD for the 5th grade completion ceremony is finished. As has been my practice for the las three years, no Microsoft products were harmed (read: used at all) for this product.

The Process

1. All photos of the children are organized in iPhoto and touched up or modified in Photoshop Elements 2.
2. The actual "slideshow" is put together in Keynote 2 and gets exported as a QuickTime movie.
3. Music was composed, orchestrated, and recorded in Sibelius 3 (with a little help from Audio Hijack).
4. Children's voiceovers are recorded in Audio Hijack. Both these voices and the music get imported and organized in to iTunes.
5. All media gets dumped into iMovie. Audio recordings are sorted through and added from within iMovie.
6. The whole package is exported to iDVD. A bonus slideshow is added from within iDVD. We burn, and DVD labels are created in Pages.

The Good

iPhoto is awesome. I organize everything image related in iPhoto – digital photographs, desktop pictures, stock photos. I love that program. Also, Keynote 2 is a great tool. I've discovered so many neat things about it during this last project. Apple's media browsers built into their iWork and iLife applications is also great. Since all of my audio was organized in iTunes, and all of the images were organized in iPhoto, all of my resources were no more than a click or two away – even if the application it was stored in was closed!

Getting away from Apple's products, Sibelius is really growing on me now that I am learning some more about it, but I have a long way to go. Now if only I could justify upgrading the instruments to Kontakt Player Gold! Also, Audio Hijack was great for recording the kids' voices. It also saved my tail once, and I'll talk about that further down in this post.

Also, Christine H. gets mentioned in the awesome category. She composed the beautiful music that went into this year's project. I merely acted as orchestrator and arranger.

The So-So

iMovie and iDVD were acting flakey this time around. For the first time, I began experiencing some slowdowns and unexpected terminations in iMovie, and iDVD got screwed up burning the first DVD and produced a coaster. I opened up my Process Viewer in OS X, and my CPU usage never maxed out, nor was I in any danger of running out of memory while iMovie was running. (Update: As far as iDVD goes, that coaster turned out to be my fault, so iDVD worked as well as expected.) I guess my main iDVD complaint is that I feel like I'm growing out of it.

The Bad

Things got rushed at the end, so there are still some details I am left unhappy with. That's my own fault. I did not pace myself as well this year as I have in previous years.

Keynote's "drop" slide transition did not translate well into video, and I wish I had made some time to compose some additional music for the extra slideshow. Another weird Keynote flaw was the "fly" transition: when I used it on an object (technically it's a text transition), it would leave artifacts only if the object was coming from the left side of the screen.

Finally, Sibelius was not behaving at all when I was trying to export the score as an audio track. It would always come out as an unreadable file. Fortunately, I was able to use Audio Hijack to record the music while it was playing, and that saved the day!

The End

Overall, the project went well. Now all that's left is duplicating a bunch of copies as parents order them. (I really need to invest in one of those disc duplicators before I fry my computer's optical drive!) The glitches seemed pretty random and isolated, and, overall, my "Made on a Mac" DVD was another relatively pain-free experience.

Product Links

• Apple iLife - includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and GarageBand.
• Apple iWork - includes Keynote and Pages.
• Sibelius Software - makers of Sibelius 3 and distributors of Kontakt Player Silver and Gold.
• Rogue Amoeba - makers of Audio Hijack Pro.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements - less daunting and less expensive photo editing from the makers of Photoshop.

Tags: work, software