Create a Magic Fireball Video Using the Software On Your Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's have a little fun and I'll show you how to make a video where you throw a fireball using only the software that comes with your Mac. 

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The basic idea here is I want to be able to hold a fireball in my hand and then throw it using just the software on my Mac. To do this we're primarily going to use iMovie. But we're also going to use QuickTime Player to record and then Keynote to make the fireball. That's right! There's a hidden fireball inside of Keynote. So first I want to go to QuickTime Player. Go to File, New Movie Recording and then I can set the camera, microphone, and quality. I'll just use High Quality here. Then start recording. So I'm going to start recording and then hold the fireball in my hand. I'm not going to worry about holding my hand steady because you'll see you'll be about to move the fireball around. Then I'm going to throw it. 

Now let's go to Keynote and create our fireball. I'm just going to use a standard presentation here. I'm going to get rid of these two default fields here and then change its size. So I'm going to go into Documents and change the Slide Size to Custom. Then let's change it to something like 500 by 500. Let's reduce the zoom a little bit so I can see all the edges. Now let's add a fireball to this. 

So to add a fireball what I'm going to do is create a shape that's a circle. Then I'm going to go to Format here. Let's change the circle color to something that would work well with the fireball. Like dark red. In fact I'm going to click on the wheel here and then change its opacity to be about 25%. If I make it too transparent the special effect isn't going to work at all. But I want to make it pretty transparent so it's kind of like the ball is hidden there. 

Now I'm going to go to Animate and I'm going to Add An Effect. I'm going to do that as a build in, Add an Effect, and I'm going to choose Flame. There's the fireball. But it only lasts for a short period time. So let's change the duration to 60 seconds. The maximum that you can have it. So now when I preview it you can see it starts up and just keeps burning for 60 seconds which would be plenty long for me to hold the fireball and throw it. Now let's go and make this a little bit larger. I'm going to Format and Arrange. Let's, instead of it being 100 by 100 let's have it be 250 by 250. Then I'll center it but I know the flames are going to go up so I'm going to move it down a little bit right there. Now let's go to Animate again and preview. We can see it burning like that. Perfect. 

Now we have to make it transparent. So in order to do that you want to click on the background here. So I'll click on that. I want to go to Format and I can change the background from color fill to No Fill. Then I'm going to go to Export it as a transparent video. Note that you have to be using Catalina version 10.15.2. The latest update because there was a bug in the original Catalina at .1 that prevented exporting transparent video from Keynote. So I'm going to Export to a movie. Then I'm going to go and change the resolution to Custom. Change it to 500 by 500 which is what we had there and Apple ProRes 4444 which then gives me this checkbox here for Export with transparent backgrounds. Make sure that is checked. Everything else you can leave the same. Then go Next.

Then go to the Desktop. I'm going to Export this just called Fireball. So I have Fireball Movie.com which is the video of me and then Fireball.mov which is this transparent fireball.

Now let's go over the iMovie and create a new project. In this project I'm going to bring in both the movie of me and drop that into the timeline and this fireball. I'm going to bring the fireball in and put it on top above the video of me. So it actually is a separate track there. You can do two tracks in iMovie. You can see now the transparent fireball burning over the picture of me. So the first things is let's trim these videos here. 

You can see the point in the video where I hold my hand up like I'm holding a fireball goes right about here. So let's go there and let's use Command B to trim that and I'll move this to start there and I'll get rid of that. Then likewise I can trim this as well to get to the point where the fireball is actually burning. So there it is about there so I'll go like that and I'll put that at the beginning. So now you can see that the fireball starts right about the time I want it to start in my hand. Now all I need to do is position it. 

I've got this movie here setup as an overlay. I can click the overlays here and go from Cutaway to Picture-in-Picture and that's going to put it in a little movable area here. So now I can position it to be over my hand. Let's expand this timeline here by moving the slider all the way to the right. So now we can go and see there it appears. Now the problem is it's not moving with my hand. It's steady. We can add Key Frames to make it move. I'm going to go all the way back to the beginning here to make sure I have this overlay selected. It's at the timeline very close to the beginning. If you don't see this little button here for adding a key frame just click the overlay again to make it appear.

Now I can click here to add a new key frame at the play head. I'm going to use the forward arrow key to move forward a few frames. You're going to see the fireball start to appear. There it is. You can see the edge of it. So I'm going to go and move it now to a spot where it's just hovering above my hand. When I do notice this changes. Just by moving this I'm adding a key frame. So I don't have to keep clicking this to add key frames. I just need to move it. So now going to go forward five more frames and then move this again. It will add a key frame.

The thing about key frames is it will move the object between the key frames. So a few frames ago it was over here and then now it's over there. You can see how it moves it in-between each one. So now all I need to do is advance it a few frames at a time. Let's say five frames. Then move the fireball so it's always above my hand. So I'll do that here again. I'll keep doing that for the entire movie. It sounds like a lot of work but really will only take a few minutes. Just five taps of the forward arrow and then move. Then five taps again.

So now I've gotten to the point where I'm starting to throw the fireball. So I not only want to move it a little bit but I want to actually drag the edges and make it a little bit bigger each time. So I'll break it off here with Command B and also click on the video below with Command B. Now get rid of these two pieces here. There we go. We've got our video. Now I can enlarge this again here and I can scrub along and I can see that the fireball moves along with my hand, because I've set all those key frames, and that it even enlarges here at the end. 

Then of course I can File and then Share and then Export it as a file. I'm not going to worry about holding my hand steady because you saw you'll be able to move the fireball around and then I'm going to throw it. So you can get other special effects. Maybe ones that you make in software or ones that you acquire maybe in collections online. Then you can use the same technique to have them move around in iMovie and change size. Or you can do it with things that don't animate. For instance you can create a simple arrow and have that follow a player around a sports field. It's a lot of fun to play with.