How To Create Video Travel Maps With Keynote

Instead of using iMovie travel maps, you can create an animated travel map using any background map you have and trace a detailed route onto it. This tutorial will also teach you some basic Keynote animation techniques. You can even add a graphic or icon to follow the path.
You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create animated travel maps in Keynote. 
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Now in two recent videos I showed you how to use the Travel Maps feature in iMovie. But then also how to make your own custom travel maps using Apple Motion. Well you can do the same thing that I showed in Apple Motion but in Keynote. So if you know Keynote already and you prefer not to use a new tool let me show you how to do it. 
Here in Keynote I'm just going to create a new basic presentation here. I'll get rid of the default text field. I'm going to drag in a map. So I've got this map right here. Let's go and have it cover the entire frame. Now what we want to do is have a path that follows the trail here and shows the path that is traveled. So we're going to go to Shape and I'm not going to use any of the shapes here. But I'm going to click on this button at the upper right, that's the Draw With a Pen Tool. This will allow me to create a path. So I'm going to zoom in here. Find the starting point and then I'm just going to click on different points to create the path. I'm not trying to get it perfect because we are quite zoomed in here so you're not going to notice the nuances of the path once you see this as a video. Also we're going to smooth it out after a little bit anyway. So let me finish the path. Now when I'm done I can press the Escape Key and I'm done drawing that line. 
If I double click on it you can see I can see the path and Edit any of these points that I need to. Hit the Delete Key and delete one. I can also with one point selected, select all of them with Command A. Then if I Control click on anyone of these points I can select Make Smooth Point which will smooth this whole thing out to a nice curve which I think will work best. I can continue to say work with various different points here to get things like I want. So let's say this is good enough here. 
Let's go and with this selected I can Line Type. So there's a lot I can set here. For instance I could set it to a Dotted Line. I can make it a little bit bigger. I can change the color of the line, like that and get it to look like I want. The idea here is this is the final state of the line.
Now I need to Animate it. Animating is pretty straight forward. Just click on Animate here with the line selected. For Build In I can add an effect and one of the effects that is listed here is Line Draw. So if I preview that it draws a line, like that, which is great. Select it and then Modify it. First, two seconds is probably too short. Let's go and increase that to all the way to say 7 seconds. Then let's have it go to the acceleration of None. So instead of starting slow, getting faster, and then slowing down again at the end it will just do it a consistent rate. So let's do Preview here and we can see it draw out the path that is followed. Then we can continue to go and alter this and try to get it exactly like we want. 
Now let's also have a Graphic follow the line. So we can do that. It's a separate animation. But we can make it so that it syncs with this line draw animation. So, I'm going to bring in the graphic of a Hiker here and I'm going to shrink it down a bit. I'm not going to worry about what where it starts, but I'm just going to put it near the beginning. Then I'm going to select the hiker there and I'm going to Shift Click and select the line as well. Then I'm going to go to Format, Shapes & Lines, and make Motion Path From Shape. It's going to prompt me to click the shape that will generate the Motion Path. So I'm going to click the Shape like that. Now this guy is going to follow the path. Now I need to make sure these happen at the same time at the same rate. So I'm going to go and click the guy here and you can see the Animate Action and it is set to move, the duration is only one second. Well, we need it to be 7 seconds to match the duration of the Line Draw so that they perfectly match each other. We are also going to have to make sure the acceleration matches so in this case None. 
Now if we were to view this they would happen one at a time. The line would draw first and then the guy would move. We're going to click on Build Order at the bottom right and see here there are the two animations. We're going to select the hiker and have it start with Build 1 so they happen at the same time. We will also select the line and have it start after the transition. So right away. Not waiting for a click. Now if we Preview this we'll see the line draw right under the hiker. They match perfectly. 
So one last thing we can do here is have the hiker actually face the right direction. So notice if I were to select the hiker here and I've got the move animation there's a Line To Path. If I select that and then I preview notice how the hiker now will kind of face, in this case, feet first the direction of the path. It doesn't really work out great. For the hiker you may want to bring the graphic in at a different angle or what we can do with the hiker selected, as I'm going to select Format, Image and then I'm going to replace the image with this kayak graphic. So let's pretend the trail is a river instead. Now the kayak graphic is oriented straight up and down. So now that I replaced the hiker with the kayak if I were to go to Animate here, look and then Preview, you can see the kayak actually does follow there because straight down it is kind of going to follow the path. 
Now to Export this to a video I can go to File, and then Export To, Movie. The settings at the top here don't really matter. But I want to make sure my resolution is the same as the video I'm creating say in iMovie or Final Cut or wherever. Then I might want to set the compression type to somewhat high but HEVC is probably fine for most purposes. Export with transparent background doesn't matter in this case since the background is completely covered with the map so I don't need to use that. I can click Save and then I can Save this to the Desktop. Now I have this video here. Let's look at it in Quick Look. There is the path. I can now bring this video into iMovie and use it in a longer video project. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
How To Create Video Travel Maps With Keynote

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