Presentation Zen: Lessons from the art of storyboarding

From the entry:

A good storyboard artist is a good storyteller. The drawings do not have to be pretty, but they must have the meaning and the feelings behind the idea. A good storyboard artist is a good pitchman.

KeynoteUser: K09 Tip: Multi-color gradients

This is a great tip on using Keynote’s new tool for advanced gradients. I hadn’t even noticed this as I’ve worked with Keynote ’09.

Tags: keynote, software, garr reynolds

If you picked up a copy of iWork ’09, you might have noticed the attractive new theme chooser. You might have also noticed that custom themes and third-party themes look pretty bad in it. It’s not unusable, but if you’re as big a perfectionist as I am, the visual disparity can become grating.


Keynote’s new themes have beautiful large preview images, and you can see sample slides from the theme by mousing over the theme images.


Your custom themes will look pixelated in the new theme chooser and will contain no sample slides.

Fortunately, the fix is an easy one.

First, open a new presentation in the theme you want to convert. (For this example, I’m using the 1024x768 variation of Keynote Pro’s Barcelona theme.) Then make seven slides. If you want to follow the same pattern as Apple, they should be:

1. Title - Center (with optional image)
2. Photo - Horizontal
3. Photo - Vertical
4. Title & Bullets
5. Blank with a table
6. Blank with a bar graph
7. Blank with a pie chart

Here are examples of what I’m talking about:





Then choose “Save Theme…” from the file menu. Name it, and you’re done. That’s all there is to it. I was surprised at how simple this process is, but it can be time consuming if you have several third-party or custom themes in Keynote. Remember to back up the themes you are replacing. I’m keeping mine in a folder called Legacy Themes for safe keeping.

There are several new features in iWork ’09, and I hope to get a chance to write about some of the more prominent improvements in the coming days. In the meantime, if you have a Mac, I strongly suggest you go try out the demo. I’m not much for outright product endorsements, but I enjoy being productive with the iWork applications. You might as well.

Tags: keynote, themes

Between Simply Gospel and Simply Presentation, I'm going to be reposting the presentations that used to be showcased on the previous version of this site. However, they are going to be a little different than before (and if you found the quasi-hidden page on the old site, you know what I'm talking about already). Instead of being a series of silently progressing slides, the presentations will be uploaded as slides with narration. This workflow came out of a podcasting experiment, so I've christened this "slidecasting." (If someone else has already come up with that word, I won't feel bad.)

The Process

Beginning in Keynote, I export all of my slides as images, checking the option to create multiple images for slides with multiple builds. These images get saved into their own folder folder, so I don't lose track of them.

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If you are using PowerPoint, you can do this by selecting "Save As..." from the File menu and choosing one of the graphics options from the list of options at the bottom of the pane. The only limitation is that separate images will not be created for slides with multiple builds.



Once the images are all saved, open iMovie and drop them all into the clips pane. From there, you can drag them into the iMovie timeline in the order you want. Once the images are in the timeline and you get recording, you may want to remove some images of text and graphics builds to simplify the process.

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If your slides pan and zoom while your video plays, this means iMovie is applying the Ken Burns effect by default. To remove this effect, select all of your clips in the timeline, and choose "Show Photo Settings" from the Photos tab of the Media pane. In the resultant dialog window, make sure "Ken Burns Effect" is unchecked.

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Finally, use the record button in the Audio tab of the Media pane to record your voice. I recommend using an external microphone, and record small portions of your talk at a time. Double-clicking a clip in the timeline allows you to edit the length of that clip to better match your voice. (In the dialog box, the time is formatted in minutes : seconds : frames.)

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Once you finish this, you're ready to export the video as a QuickTime movie and share it with the world. Just choose Share > QuickTime from the system menu and follow the instructions. You might want to perform some trial-and-error with the settings to find a result you like at a reasonable file size.

Some Limitations

• Any media embedded into the slides will not play. You can just add that media to the iMovie timeline.
  
  
• PowerPoint and Keynote slide and build animations will be lost. This isn't a big deal.
  
  
• iMovie does not have the same selection of transitions as Keynote or PowerPoint if the loss of animations bothers you.
  
  
• I'm assuming WIndows Movie Maker can do all of the iMovie steps is you are using Windows, but I have no experience with that application.

Wrapping Up

A presentation is more than just the slides and/or the handouts. You are the central figure, but the ways we usually share presentations eliminates "you" from the experience. Hopefully, this method provides you a way to share your slides in a more meaningful way with your intended audience.

Tags: software, keynote, how-to

On the Macintosh platform, there are two major choices for creating slide presentations: Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote. There are other alternatives, but many of these are basically identical to PowerPoint in interface and features.

Just like choosing an operating system, a digital music player, or even a pair of shoes, many objective and subjective reasons can affect the software you use to create a presentation. My personal preference is to compose my presentations in Keynote, and I thought I'd take a moment to write about why I prefer Apple's relatively young slide-ware application.

The Interface

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Keynote + PowerPoint

Quite simply, Keynote is much easier on the eyes than the Mac version of PowerPoint (which, incidentally, is nicer looking than the current Windows version). Keynote is a very elegant looking application that looks right at home on Mac OS X. It's interface is clean and uncluttered, doing little to distract from the main workspace. PowerPoint, on the other hand, can become a mess of toolbars and pallets. There is a lot of visual distraction going on here.

I also like how the slides are visually arranged along the side of Keynote's window. In PowerPoint, all I get is a bunch of text or slide numbers. To visually navigate my slides in PowerPoint, I have to change to Slide Sorter view. (Incidentally, you can view your slides this way in Keynote as well by choosing Light Table from the View menu. I didn't know that until recently.)

The Little Touches

Keynote produces nice looking results far more easily than PowerPoint. In the screenshots above, you can see a reflective effect under the image. No Photoshop was involved, nor did I have to invoke any tricky image reversal with alpha-masking techniques. How is this done? By checking a box that says "Reflection." Additionally, shadows are handled much more smoothly; transparency is fully supported, and there is a greater variety of 3D transitions available for Keynote.

Another big bonus in Keynote is the ability to mask images with various shapes rather than just cropping them. I have noticed, though, that you can "cut out" rectangles and circles in PowerPoint, but the tool is still no where near as flexible as Keynote's "Mask with Shape" ability.

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masking and aligning

When resizing a photograph or other imported image, Keynote maintains its dimensions by default – the entire image resizes proportionally, not just the side you are dragging, and Keynote shows alignment guides that help you see how your images and text line up.

Other Bonuses

Keynote offers many ways of sharing your presentation besides its native format. Flash, QuickTime, PPT, and PDF are among the options when exporting Keynote slides. Someone doesn't necessarily have to have Keynote to view my presentations. (In fact, Keynote is a good place to start if you want to make an iMovie project that contains a bunch of still images.)

Finally, Keynote works like a Mac application should. It talks to the other iApps seamlessly – the photos in the screenshot above ("Masking with a shape.") are all in my iPhoto library, and I can choose music from iTunes or iMovie projects I have saved. Furthermore, Mac-standard keyboard commands for aligning and formatting text, managing windows and documents, and opening up Apple's color picker all function properly. These commands can be hit-or-miss when using PowerPoint.

Conclusion

These are some of the reasons Keynote has become my presentation software of choice. It was quite a transition when I switched from PowerPoint, but it was definitely worth the effort. Keynote certainly lagged behind Powerpoint in terms of features for a couple of years, but, after only three versions, Apple's presentation program has matured into a great alternative to PowerPoint, raising the bar for what is expected of slide-ware applications on the Macintosh platform.

If you have access to a Mac (like at a local Apple Store), I suggest you take Keynote for a whirl. You might be surprised what you can do with it.

Tags: keynote, software