I’m helping a grandson’s elementary school teacher with online learning during the coronavirus outbreak. I am exporting pages children’s books projects in Pages to iMovie, and then adding recorded narration of the book text. So, the most efficient way to do this is? I have a MacBook pro and a Yeti mic.
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Charles King
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Most Efficient Way To Export a Pages Document To iMovie?
Comments: 3 Responses to “Most Efficient Way To Export a Pages Document To iMovie?”
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As you probably know, in most cases exporting a word processing document to use in a video won't work. The text would be impossible to read on a TV as it would be too small. Plus, the pages are highly vertical and video is highly horizontal. But children's books may sometimes be an exception if the text is huge or it is just images.
The way I would do it is to open the document in Pages and choose File, Export, then export as a PDF. This will give you a multi-page PDF document.
Then open that in Preview. Choose File, Export and export that as PNG. This will give you a multi-page PNG file.
You can now drag and drop that PNG file into iMovie. Believe it or not, iMovie seems to recognize the multi-page PNG format and you get a short clip in the timeline that shows each image in succession.
Next you would work with that clip. You can extend its time to slow it down. Or, you can split the clip into parts, one image per clip. Then you can change the time for each.
I think an easier way to record narration would be to use Keynote, since it has that built-in narration function. So to do that, I would go back to the PDF version in Preview. You can drag thumbnails from the left sidebar from Preview into Keynote to make slides. So do that for each page individually until you have all of them in Keynote as separate slides. Then record narration like I demonstrate in https://macmost.com/using-keynote-to-create-narrated-videos.html and export as video.
Thanks Gary! The shutdown of schools connected to the coronavirus has meant that teachers have needed a lot of help. Recording kids books for them they can use as part of reading week really helps them out… Your contribution to the effort is appreciated.
You could also create documents in Keynote. Once the document is created you can select File > Export To > Movie. This will give you a .m4v file that you can easily import into iMovie - this is what I do at work.