Build Unique Custom iMovie Transitions With Keynote On Your Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to build your own custom iMovie transitions using Keynote.

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So with Keynote's ability to build videos that have transparent backgrounds you can basically use Keynote to create these cool custom transitions. It's just a matter of building a slide that's starts completely transparent, something happens to cover everything up, and then it gets transparent again. You could use all of the different transition and animation tools in Keynote to accomplish this. Let's look at two examples.

First let's create a very simple transition. A lot of transitions are simply just filling the screen with something and then removing it. Then you have it go from one video to the other. At the point where the screen is completely filled with something else that's where you switch videos. We're going to start in the Wide screen here because most video is going to be wide screen. We're going to go to a simple black blank template there. I'm going to zoom out as much as I can so I can see as much of the surrounding area and get rid of the default text that's there. Then I'm going to add a simple shape. The idea is that I want this shape to fill the whole screen. But I'm going to actually do a lot more with it than that. 

The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to instead of using the blue color I want to use a graphic. So I downloaded a graphic from online. I can just drag it into the shape. It's just this fun little graphic here and I'm going to make sure it fills the entire shape there. Then I don't want it to be actually straight like this. I want it to actually be slanted so it will slide over in kind of a diagonal way. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go to Arrange and I'm going to make it basically twice the size because I then also want to rotate it 45 degrees. The idea here is I want it to slide across like this. You can see by having it be that size I will end up with a spot in the middle here where it's completely covering the screen. So let's put it here to start with. Right there at the corner.

Now I'm going to go and Control click on the slide and duplicate the slide. It's because we're going to use Magic Move. Magic Move wants two identical slides. Go back to the first slide here, go to Animate, and say I want to add the effect Magic Move. So Magic Move is going to transition between this first slide and the second slide. So I want to go to the second slide now and move this so that it's all the way to the other side so the other corner matches there. So it starts here, ends there. So now when I go and Preview Magic Move you could see it moves all the way across like that. 

Now I want to make this black background transparent. So in this first slide here I want to click on the background. I want to go to Format and I'm going to change the background to No Fill. This is very important. This won't work if you don't do that. You have to do it for the second  slide as well. Click on the background and go to No Fill. So now I have No Fill for both slides. So basically this is transparent. This graphic slides over on top of it. In addition to that when I go to Animate there are other things I can change like the Duration. Let's make it a little bit longer and I'll show you why in a minute. Then I'm going to change Acceleration to None so it's just going to slide across at a uniform rate.

Now I'm going to go to File and Export To and Movie. I'm going to take the timing to zero so it just does the animation and nothing else. I'm going to change the Resolution to Custom. This is very important because not only do you want to change the resolution to the video's size that you're using but you want to switch to Apple ProRes 4444 because you need to use Export with transparent backgrounds. This will not work if you don't have the transparent backgrounds. So then we'll do Next and then we'll Save this out.

So now I can take a look and here's the video. If I click on the video and then I hit the Spacebar it will show me a quick look preview in the Finder and you can see a gray background there telling me it's transparent. You can see it all the way across. So here I am in iMovie. I have two different clips here. I want to put the transition right between the two clips. Now I'll move this over a bit and drag this file here as an overlay. So on top here right around the middle between those two clips. So I can move this about right here. You want to get it right to the middle. If I move the playback head right here it should be covering everything. It almost is. There's a corner there so you could still maybe zoom in a little bit and further adjust to get it to the point where it's perfect. You can see the lemons appear on the left, the switch happens right there, and then the lemons go out that way.

Now four seconds is probably too long for this but I wanted to make it four seconds so I have the versatility to make it any speed I want. So what I can do here is I can click on this and then with these tools up here I can click the Speed tool and I can set the speed to be fast. I could adjust it anyway I want. It's going to cut the time in half so do it 2X. I can do it 4X or I can make an adjustment. 2X is probably really good for what I want. I need to recenter it so the center is right here in the middle again. There, that's perfect! Now the transition will happen in 2 seconds to go across.

Now let's try something else. I'm going to go and just create a circle shape here. I'm going to move it to the upper left. Shift drag a corner so it gets relatively big and leave it there. Then I'm going to bring in that same graphic. I'm going to actually shrink it down a little bit so it just fits right in there. So now I have a circle full of lemons. I'm going to add a line and I'm going to drag the bottom left hand corner of that line to the center of that circle and then the other end of the line to the center of the slide. I'm going to select both of these. The line and the circle and do Format, Shapes and Lines, and make a motion path from Shape and click the line. 

So now what will happen is if I go to Animate here, I can click off of it and click on the circle again and go to Animate, I can Preview it and you can see the circle moves there into the middle. Now I can click this red dot there and then it will expand again. I can click this red dot again and I could say I also want it to Scale. So now I can Shift click any of these dots here and scale it up to the point where it fills the slide. So now when I do Preview it is going to scale up. I can actually click Build Order here and see that I've got a Move and a Scale. I can select the scale and say start it with Build One. So group them together. So now when I do Preview it's going to both move and scale up. 

Now I'm going to add one more transition here by clicking the red dot and say Opacity. I'm going to leave this one as separate. Instead of starting on click I'm going say after Build Two. So it's going to do these first two together and then the last one. The opacity, you can see here I've got that selected here, I can go down to zero. So I have the Move, the Scale happening together and then change the opacity down to zero. I could click on any of these and change the the Acceleration to ease in or ease out or just say none for all of them let's say. Now I can Preview. You could see it does that. 

So it starts off blank, this moves in and scales up, and then it fades away. Now I can do the same thing as before. I'm going to click on the Background and click on Format. Change the background to No Fill. One last thing I want to do is I want to delete this line here so there is not a white line that's in the way. Now I can go and Export To and do Movie and then go to Custom Resolution 1920. Apple ProRes 4444 with the Transparent Background checked. Export it here. Now I can go into iMovie and replace this transition here, I'll just delete it, with this one. Bring this one right here to the middle so that the lemons are completely covered at the point where I do the switch. So now you can see the transition there.

So really the sky's the limit here. You can use different shapes, different animation techniques, different transitions. Anything you want. So if you like to use iMovie and you want to have your videos looking really unique then it pays to really get to know Keynote so you can build transitions like these.