Extreme Video Special Effects Using Keynote

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to create all sorts of extreme, bizarre video special effects using Keynote.

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So I know I often show off how to use Keynote to create overlays that you can use in iMovie on your videos. But you could just use Keynote by itself. By bringing a video into Keynote you can overlay all sorts of stuff on it. So let's start by using the basic black theme. I'm going to get rid of the three text fields that are there. I'm also going to zoom out a bit so I can see the entire surrounding area of the slide. Now the general idea here is to have a single slide in a Keynote presentation and drag and drop a video onto it.

So the Keynote presentation is 1920 by 1080 and so is this video. So it fits perfectly in there. So now it's just a single slide with a video. If I go then to Export as a movie I can change the resolution to 1080. I can set the next slide to zero seconds so it doesn't add any extra to the end. I can then hit Next and export this to the Desktop. It will export it as a video.  So that just gets us a copy of the video and it doesn't really add any extra effects. But now that we know that works we can use this to add all sorts of special effects in Keynote.

Let's start with some simple text. I'm going to create a shape here and just use a box. I'm going to just position it in the top left hand corner. Expand it a bit and put some sample text in it. Now I can play around with the font a bit. Make it a little bit larger. I can take the style for the box itself and let's say assign a line border to it. I can even go to Arrange here and rotate it a bit. So it's basically just this text box here that's kind of an overlay on the video. Now if I were to export this I would get this overlaid on top of the video. Which is nice and you could do the same kind of thing in iMovie. 

What's hard to do in iMovie is create multiple overlays. Because here I can go and let's create a rounded rectangle here and I'll assign a different style. Make it blue like that, Let's do a line border. Let's do a drop shadow even. I'll put it here. I'll rotate it the other way. I'll type something in here. Text style to something else. Make it bigger. Now I've got two overlays. So that's really nice to be able to put as much as you want on top of the video. But we can go further by applying animations to these. 

So let's go to this sample text here and go to Animate, then Action, and Add an effect. Now we can add one of these things. Lets for instance look at the Jiggle effect. I preview that and we can see what happens there. That's a pretty interesting effect to grab attention. We can apply that. I can set the duration. Now this video is 18 seconds long so we can apply it across the entire length of the video. We can change things like the intensity of it and see the preview there. 

Once we have that added we'll click on Build Order here. In Build Order you could see the first item here is the movie. To start the movie and it'll start on click. I want to change that to after transition so it starts immediately. Then we'll go to Sample Text and that we want to change from Start on click to With Build 1. So now when we play we'll get that jiggle there for that piece of text. Let's assign another one to here. So I'll go to Animate, Action, Add an Effect and this time I'll do Pop which puts a single pop like that. So we can set the duration. We can set the scale of the pop. We can go in and look at Build Order. Select that and say we want it to do With Build 1. We can also build a delay in here. Instead of starting right away it can wait 2 seconds. So now when I hit Play you can see the jiggle there and after 2 seconds More Text will pop. Now that we've applied these lets see what happens if we export. So we'll Export movie and we'll do that same thing we did before. Now let's checkout the video. You can see here the resulting video with the jiggle and the pop right there. 

So there are a lot of other things we can do too. Let's go into Shape here and let's look for a sun shape like this. I'll move it here to the bottom left. Let's enlarge it a bit. Let's go to Format, Style, make it Yellow. Let's add a Shadow to it as well. Let's go to Animate and then I'll do Action, Add an Effect and let's select Rotate. We can see it does a slight rotation there. Let's have it rotate clockwise and lets have it do it for the full 18 seconds and let's set it using Angles. Let's use the number of Rotations. So over 18 seconds let's have it rotate 18 times. I'll change Acceleration to None. Let's go to Build Order and make sure we set it to With Build 1. 

Now we've got Start Movie, then Jiggle, and then With Build 1 we're going to do More Text but with a 2 second delay. So that means that everything after it is also going to have a 2 second delay. So we want to move this Rotation above it. We want to make sure Move Text is the last thing since that's delayed. So let's make sure here on the first one that stays after Transition because it will change automatically to On Click. Then With Build 1, With Build 1, With Build 1 with a 2 second delay. Great. Now let's test it out by playing and now we can see the rotating sun there. As you can guess when we export it it looks just like that.

Now how about an animation. Let's go to Shapes here. Look for an airplane. Let's take this one here. Make it a little bit bigger. Make it a color. Let's have it start here on the left side. We'll do Animate. Add an Effect. Move. Then we'll have this line here and we will take it to the other side of the screen. So now when we preview it and you can see it zooms across the screen like that. We can take away the Acceleration. We can go to Build Order now and make sure this is With Build 1. Let's also move it up here so it's above the Pop delay there. So let's check everything again On Click. I'm going to change that With Build 1, With Build 1, after build 3, nope, we want With Build 1, and With Build 1. So now it should do that. So that's getting pretty extreme there. Lots of things going on on the screen. Let's go and export and see what it looks like. 

So now we see in the video it looks just like it does when we previewed it in Keynote. So we've applied animations to these text boxes and these shapes. Of course we could bring photos in as well. What about the video itself?  I could select the video here and go to Action, Add an Effect and actually add one of these effects to the video itself. So, for instance, let's go and look at Pulse. Preview Pulse and you can see what it does there. Let's select it. Let's do it for 18 seconds. Let's have it pulse 18 times. Adjust the Build Order to get everything right again. In this case we'll have the movie start after the Transition and then the Pulse will start after Build 1. But then the rest of these will be With Build 2, With Build 2, and all the way down With Build 2 with the 2 second delay. So now when we play it we can see the video itself pulses. Now it's pulsing to make it smaller than the entire thing. We can actually enlarge the video size a little bit so you never see the edges.

We can do even more than that. For instance we can change it from Pulse to Rotate and have the video spin around. Flip also creates an interesting effect. You can see what it does when I preview the Flip like that. We can also create shapes and then have those overlay the video with color. So for instance I can put a rectangle shape here on top of everything. Let's go to Format. I'll change it to Advanced Gradient Fill and I will set it so that kind of the middle here is like a central line there. On the left side I'm going to have a light blue and it's going to be transparent so I reduce the opacity to nothing. The right side here also a light blue and make that transparent. Then in the middle here make that light blue but 100%. So you can see that line there.

I can do various things with this in Animation. So I can have it change it opacity. I can have it move around. I could have it Blink like that and create a strobe effect. I'm going to try to rotate it and you could see how it rotates like that. So I can change the rotation to say 18 rotations in 18 seconds. No acceleration. Preview it. You could do that. Then I could go in and change it so that the size is huge. So it will rotate and you won't ever see the edges. So I've got that here in the center. Now when I preview it you can see it does that. 

We can relayer things by going to Arrange and then you could Send to Back or Send Backwards. So we can send the coloring all the way to the back behind the video. Then we can click on the video and send that to the back. So now we have the video and coloring and all these little popup things are on top of that. Now when we Export this we'll get the same result as what we see in the preview. So now we look at the video here and we can see it all there in the final video.

You can see here I'm just layering all sorts of different effects on top of each other. There's so much else you can do. You can overlay photos. You can overlay animated GIFs. You can overlay shapes with all sorts of patterns inside them. You can apply all sorts of effects to it. You can add text in all sorts of different ways. Just keep throwing things over your video. The effects can get so bizarre and outrageous. It's really not something you're going to use for say a family video or something like that. But for creating fun stuff, music videos, things to share with your friends you could do all sorts of really neat things pretty easily in Keynote. 

The one drawback is that this really only works over one clip at a time. You can put a clip on a slide and place these things on top of it for the length of the clip. If you have a long movie and you want to put special effects over only portions of the video then that's going to be difficult to do in Keynote. But actually what can work is doing a bunch of different clips, one on each slide, having different effects on each clip and then have Keynote progress from slide to slide with the clip and the special effect on top of it. 

So this is really the kind of thing where instead of starting off with an idea in your head of what you want it to look like and then trying to make it happen it's more fun to actually just put it in Keynote and then just come up with bizarre stuff based on what Keynote can do.