Creating a Spinning Newspaper Effect

You can easily create a spinning newspaper special effect for your video projects using a one-slide Keynote presentation. You can export it as a video and import it into iMovie or any other video editing app as a clip or an overlay.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create a spinning newspaper effect for use in your video projects. 
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The Spinning Newspaper effect is something you see in TV and movies sometimes and it could be fun to put in your own video projects. But there is nothing in iMovie that will allow you to make it. As a matter of fact I see a lot of comments from people online saying how difficult it is or how you have to go to some external apps or different resources online to get a Spinning Newspaper effect. But you can actually build one quite easily if you use Keynote. Keynote will allow you to then export as a video which you can use in iMovie or any video editing app. 
So in Keynote here I'm just going to create a new basic black presentation. I'm going to get rid of the text fields that are there. I'm going to build the animation right on here. Now, of course, the first thing you need is the newspaper graphic. So either you've created this for yourself or you've downloaded one or whatever, you've got one built and I'm just going to bring it in there. This is a pretty good one as it is semi-transparent. So there is no background color there. I'm just going to put it here in the middle. Now it would be great if there was a transition that would actually bring this in in kind of that spinning newspaper animation. In fact if you go to Animate and then Build-in with this selected you'll find a variety of effects. One of them is even called Spin. But if you Preview you could see its spins in a different way. However, this isn't that bad if you want to use that special effect. As a matter of fact there is a bunch of different built-in transitions that you could use instead of a newspaper spin. 
So, for instance, here's Swoosh. Here's Twirl which gives you the newspaper spin but it is not changing the size. it's always at the same size. It is just a quick rotation. There is also Pop. You can play with these and these might work really great for you. If that is the case then you can skip to the end where I tell you how to export from Keynote. But let's try to get the actual real newspaper spin where it starts small, grows to full size all the time while spinning. 
Now to do that we're going to have to combine two effects. But unfortunately you can't do that in a Build-in. So, for instance, if I  were to use Twirl I can just have Twirl. I can't add on top of that Pop or Scale or something. So I'm going to not use any Build-in. Instead use an Action Animation. Action Animations can actually be built on top of each other. So let's add an effect here. You can see there are far fewer effects that are available. But one of them is Rotate and the other is Scale. So combining two of these we should be able to get the newspaper spin. Let's start by adding Scale. 
Now when I Preview it I can see that it starts at the current size and gets bigger. So for this to look good let's not add the effect yet but instead let's scale this down so it is the starting size. If I grab one of the handles here and I drag it will shrink it but I have to recenter it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold the Option Key down and drag which will shrink it but keeps it centered. I'm going to have it start about there. Now I'm going to add the effect of Scale. You can see if I Preview it gets a little bit bigger. That's fine. We can customize that. Let's scale here and let's set all the parameters. 
First let's have it go for about 2 seconds instead. Second, let's have it scale bigger. You can see it's going to show me the end state there. So right at about 500% works good for this particular example. Now we want to set the acceleration. Right now if we Preview it, it eases in and eases out. In other words it starts slowly, gets faster and then slows down again. If we changed it to None it would scale at a constant rate. But, I think for this the ideal thing would be to ease out. So it starts fast, or at full speed at least, and then slows down. So that works out really good. So we've got Scale set here.
Now if we can have it spin at the same time we've got our effect. We can do that if we click Add Action here and now we can add Rotate. So let's do that. You can see it is just going to rotate 45 degrees counterclockwise. That's not what we want at all! First, I think it looks a little bit better if we rotate clockwise. So let's have it do that. Second, I'm going to have it rotate no degrees. In other words end the same as it starts. But you can set the number of rotations. Let's have it rotate a bunch of times, say 7 rotations. Now let's set the Duration to 2 seconds so it does it for the same amount of time as the scaling. Set the acceleration also to ease out so it starts at full speed and then slows down towards the end. 
Now if we Preview this we see the Spin. Great. So we want both to happen at the same time. If you click on Build Order here at the bottom we can see we've got the Scale and we've got the Rotate. But one is going to happen first after a click and the second will happen after that on a click. We can change on Click to With Build 1. So these two will happen now at the same time. In fact we can change Build 1 to not start on click but right after the transition. In other words as soon as the slide appears. Now if we Preview both at the same time we can see we get our newspaper spin effect exactly as we want. 
So now the next thing we want to do is we want to get this out of Keynote and in a video form we can use in a project. So to do that all we need to do is Export. Now since I have a semi-transparent newspaper here and I don't want to use this black background I'm going to go to Format and then click on the background of the slide and now I've got Format for the slide selected. I can set the color fill to No Fill. So now it is a transparent slide even though black is going to be used as the color here in Keynote, it will be transparent when we Export. Alternatively, I can forget about that and actually use a Fill or Gradient Fill or put a picture behind this and Export the entire thing just as a regular video. That's fine too. 
So let's go to File Now and then Export To and then let's export to a movie. Now we can ignore all of this stuff except for the resolution. Make sure it is set to Custom and make sure it is set to the width and height of the video project that we're using. So in this case it's  4K video project. We do a 30 frames per second rate and we want to do a compression type. We want to choose a type that allows export with transparent backgrounds. However, if you're not doing that, if you're not making the background transparent, then it doesn't matter. You could use any type, like H264 and it won't matter that you don't have a transparent background. You just won't be able to use it over something in iMovie. You would have to use all by itself which is fine too. 
Let's go and choose HEVC or Apple ProRes 4444 are the two ways that we can have Export with transparent backgrounds. Note that this won't work if we didn't set the background to No Fill for this slide. If for some reason you've got multiple slides they all have to be set to have a background No Fill. So now we're going to Save and we're going to Export this out to the Desktop. Now here on the Desktop we've got our video. I'm going to look at it in Quick Look and there it goes. Now in iMovie I can bring this in real easily by simply dragging the file and sticking it, say, here at the beginning of the video. So now I've got this video here. It starts like that. 
But I could also have set this up to be over a background. So I can go to Backgrounds here and then choose a background. So let's pick something like this simple background here. Stick that there and then if I bring in that same video and stick it on top, like that, then you can see this is 7 seconds long. Let's change this to also be 7 seconds long, so it matches. You can see that this will be over that background because it is semi-transparent. Obviously, if you were doing it without a transparent background then you wouldn't need to do this. You would just have it by itself. You can even move this over some video you've got. So here I've got it coming out of the video that I have. Make sure, of course, you have this setup as a Cutaway in the video overlay settings so it just appears full frame over the background or video. 
Back here in Keynote you can easily reuse this animation by selecting it and you don't have to change any of this stuff except go to Image. You've got a Replace button here. So it is really easy to simply replace the newspaper with another one without having to rebuild everything from scratch. So I hope you find this video effect useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “Creating a Spinning Newspaper Effect”

Dave Taenzer

2 months ago

Great stuff! Thanks.

Michael Z Freeman

Nice and straightforward rather than having to go into Apple Motion or Final Cut Pro.

Gordon Boorse

Gary, I absolutely love your teaching videos. I don't know how you keep up with your ideas, knowledge about so many subjects, ways to do things and then put them together for us. to see. Thank you!

Robert Bailey

Very clever! Does Keynote give you the option of adding some kind of motion blur? I can't check it right now because I just had carpal tunnel surgery.

Gary Rosenzweig

Robert: Not that I can think of, as a part of something like this if that is what you mean. But maybe if you had this going slower (14 seconds long instead of 7) and then speed it up in iMovie you'd get what you want?

Patrick Mc Namee

This time Gary you really have excelled yourself - what a useful movie and explained with a clarity and succinctness that reveals outstanding expertise. Thank you so much and I intend to use this technique in all sorts of circumstances.

Tom Roche

1 month ago

Great stuff Gary

Creating a Spinning Newspaper Effect

Comments: 7 Responses to “Creating a Spinning Newspaper Effect”

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