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