Creating Animated Video Overlays With Keynote

You can use Keynote's animations and special effects in your video projects. Just create the animation in Keynote over a green background. Then export as video and import into iMovie. Use the green screen overlay function in iMovie to place the animation over your other video.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let me show you how to create transparent animated video overlays with Keynote that you can then use in iMovie and other video apps.
Many years ago I had a popular video where I showed you how to use Keynote to create a transparent animation and then overlay that with your video in iMovie. You can't do that anymore because you can't export as a transparent video in Keynote but you can do the next best thing which is to use green screen to simulate transparency.
We're going to create a new presentation in Keynote. Just use a white background here. Then we're going to get rid of things on the default slide and go to Format and Background and change the background to the greenest green. It looks ugly but remember the green is going to be removed.
Now we're going to add some text just as an example. Let's make the text a little more interesting. I'll select All and change the font to make it larger. Then let's make it white and I'll give it shadow. There so now we've got that. 
Let's animate it now. So we go to Animate up here, add a Built in Effect and we'll add it as Bouncy to bounce in. It is certainly animated. For Built Out we will make it Vanish with a little explosion there. So now we've got both of those. Built In and Built Out. Now all we need to do is export.
So we'll go to File Export and export as QuickTime and we'll stick with the default setting which is going to be the same size as the screen. It doesn't matter because we're going to overlay this. You're not going to see the edges of the screen so even though you might be doing a 1080 video we can do it as a smaller size here or you can do 1080.
I'm not going to really play around with any of these settings because you don't need to do anything special here. I'm going to export it as an m4v and it will create the movie and now we can move over to iMovie to bring it in.
So here I have a sample video in an iMovie project. I want to bring that animated overlay into it. So I'm going to go to File, Import Media and I'm going to go to the Desktop and grab that m4v that I just created. Here you can see it; the word amazing over green. 
I'm going to drag this whole thing and have it overlay this video. Now you can see it completely overlays it so you can't see it. So with it selected I want to go ahead, you have all these controls here at the top, I want to choose this first one over here which gives me the ability to do all sorts of different things like cutaways and all sorts of other video overlays. 
I want to change it to GreenBlue Screen. You can see it automatically there goes ahead and gets rid of all the green. Now you can just see the text over it so if I play it I'll see the text bounce in and then leave. It looks almost as good as if I had an actual transparent video. It really does a good job of getting rid of the green there. 
Of course if I was using green text it wouldn't work so well. Then you might want to switch to actually using blue rather than green but you get the basic idea here of how you can do simple things like just some text there like that or animate some images or other things from a presentation and use it to overlay video inside of iMovie.

Comments: 9 Responses to “Creating Animated Video Overlays With Keynote”

Sander

9 years ago

Great video as always! But you probably missed that it is still possible to export a transparent clip from keynote. The only thing you have to do is to set the background color to No Fill. Than under export format you select custom, and make sure to select Apple ProRes 4444.
I hope I could help!

Gary Rosenzweig

Sander: I did miss that, yes. Since there was no option to set the video to 32-bit or transparent, I assumed that any export would result in a solid background. Thanks!

Kevin McGuire

I just recently discovered these video tutorials and subscribed to them in iTunes. They have all been great, but this one in particular is just what I needed to know as I'm starting to get more involved with some video work. Amazing how simple this seems to be and I cannot wait to start using this technique on my own. Thanks for sharing!

Robert Grifa

Gary, I just wanted to say thanks for this. Very cool! I will try this out in ScreenFlow as well.

Wayne Garriepy

You've done it again! Thanks so much for your tenacity for exploring how to do things that slip by us. This little tip has 'Yuge!!!!!' value to any of us who crave going to a higher level in the fine art of title creation/ Thank you!

Bloise Wright

A very nice video, easy to follow, straight forward and much appreciated. I'm already using it in a couple of my slideshow projects. Keep up the great job, it sure is helpful to novices like me.

Lannigan

Wow. Transparent background exporting video from Keynote? There's a lot of people who have been wanting this for a very long time (I think an older version of Keynote used to be able to do this) Thank you Sander thank you Gary!

jankoman

Sander, I can't get this to work.

I set the background to no fill and exported to Apple prores 4444, the background appears white when opening the video in premiere pro. any ideas?

Sorry, please ignore that. I had to change the background to any color, then change back to no fill (this changed the background to look as black) then I exported to Aple prores 4444 and voila! in premiere appears transparent! you are the man!

Comments Closed.

Creating Animated Video Overlays With Keynote

Comments: 9 Responses to “Creating Animated Video Overlays With Keynote”

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