Directly importing iMovie HD clips by dragging into Keynote - more evidence of iWork and iLife integration

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Directly importing iMovie HD clips by dragging into Keynote - more evidence of iWork and iLife integration

Date Created: 21 Feb, 2005, 08:40 PM

I presented tonight to the Melbourne Internet Macintosh users group, known as iMUG.

This was the first meeting for the year, and featured several presentations from those of us who had visited MacWorld SFO and CES, Las Vegas. Also presented was a Skype show, and a Home Theatre array using a MacMini, an Elgato EyeHome, and other equipment. All in all, a very good set of presentations to kick the year off.

I was to take care of the CES show, since I was there, while Robert, a first-time visitor to MacWorld, used Keynote 2 to present his slide show. He had made a DV movie in iMovie, and so dropped out of Keynote to show his movie in Quicktime. I wonder if he knew he could just drag his Quicktime movie onto a Keynote slide and then resize to suit - together with nifty transitions and whatever.

Knowing he was going first and guessing he would use Keynote, I decided to use iMovie to show my presentation - which was essentially a slew of movie clips. With the volume turned down I was able to talk through my presentation, which included the Conan O'Brien interview with Bill Gates, which was Gates' CES Keynote.

It got quite a few laughs early in my talk, first because Bill didn't look too flash sitting in his comfy but low lounge chair and seemingly tiny next to the very tall Conan. It didn't help when his "Connected Home" demo failed on several occasions.

Conan's commentary, using MS and Gates as the butt of his jokes, went down well with the Mac crowd.

I had been tempted to use both iMovie and Keynote 2 for my talk, and during the day had both open experimenting with the best way to convey my message. I thought I might break down the iMovie into several DV files then import each digitised movie into Keynote slides. Because time was limited, this was not a good solution, so I decided to stay with iMovie entirely.

But in playing with Keynote/iMovie I made an interesting discovery. Looking around the web I found it documented almost as an addendum on Apple's iMovie homepage here.

"You can use the built-in iLife Media Browser to import movies into your next Keynote presentation. Or simply drag video clips from iMovie HD and drop them into Keynote."

I can't tell you how many times I've looked at that homepage, and never bothered trying this. Necessity is the motherhood of invention after all.

With the iMovie HD window open, showing the timeline and clips pane, drag a clip directly onto a Keynote slide. We are talking the raw clip you have imported direct from the DV camera.

What happens? Keynote imports it! You see the usual green "Plus" sign signifying a file is being copied, and there it is ready to be used. You can play it, resize it, rotate it, and add transitions.

You can't edit it though. You might need to be quite clever if you want to say use the last half of the clip, by using opaque screens with various timings to reveal the movie at your desired start point. But the clip will be subject to all the transitions and effects you'd expect from a movie file import.

One caveat: Dragging in an edited clip from the timeline or the clips pane brings in the original clip, not the edited one, because of the non-destruction editing abilities of iMovie. This might be the dealbreaker for some, but if you have clean clips it might save you a lot of time - or you export the edited video to your camera, and bring it back again - bit of a time waster, though.

Of course, if you edit and save iMovie and thus have permanently trashed a clip, you might be able to retrieve an edited clip into Keynote and export it as a Quicktime movie.

Early days yet, and there may be more to discover with this inter-application operability, but it might have some use for some readers. Certainly, as Age MacMan and Journalist Garry Barker said to me, "When you control the whole widget you can do amazing things."

UPDATE: You can do exactly the same drag-and-drop from iMovie into Pages as well!