MacMost Now 660: Magic Move and Anagram Transitions In Keynote

Two transitions in Keynote allow you to animate between similar slides. The Magic Move transition will animate the positions between objects from one slide to the next. This give you infinite variation and also allows you to create simple motion graphics for use in videos. The Anagram transition allows you to create an interesting build between two pieces of text.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.
On today's episode, let's take a look at two very special transitions in Keynote.
So there are two transitions in Keynote that actually look at the elements on one slide and another slide and do something special between the two slides.
The first one I want to look at is Magic Move. So Magic Move works with objects like pictures. So here I have a slide with 4 pictures on it, and what it will do is allow you to transition the positions of those pictures from one side to the next. So the key thing you need to do is make sure you have two slides that have the same pictures on them. The easiest way to do that is arrange them like this,s and then simply duplicate the slide. I'm gonna click on it and select duplicate. I end up with two slides that are exactly identical. Now, on the second side I wanna move the pictures so they're in a different location, so, let's do something simple like swap them diagonally... like that, and like that. So now you can see that I've swapped them diagonally, all i need to do now is go to the inspector, and with the inspector, I can set the transition for the slide to the Magic Move and it'll even show me what its going to do here. So it'll transition from one to the next and I can set the duration of it. And when I go back to the slide two here and hit play, and I transition with the space bar... see it actually moves them around. Now, its important to know that it'll move it to wherever I put it so if I kinda arrange them in all kinds of crazy positions like this, then I hit play, it'll stick them in those crazy positions. Or, for instance, if I go to the first slide, and lets say we put everything together like this... and now you'll see... do it like that and it slides out. So theres really a ton of different combinations of how you can use this by basically moving pictures around and having them fly into positions.
You can do more than just pictures. So I can have a bunch of different items here... a shape, some text, a chart, a picture... I can duplicate this, and on the second slide I can move these around wherever I want, and then set this to the Magic Move between them and you can see it's going to move all these different elements. You can see the chart, it kinda just fades in and fades back out, but at least it handles it.
So, in a sense you're animating graphics by just moving their positions. This can be very useful especially if you need to animate movement in a video. You can actually do that in Keynote where you can't do that in Ivory... and do the animation then export it as video and bring it into your imovie project. 
So lets look at a transition that just deals with text. So I've got 2 slides here of text and I've just taken the first one here, and I've duplicated it and then changed the text for the second slide, so now it's all set up to use the anagram transition. So I'm going to put it inspector... for the slide im going to set the effect to be anagram... and I have two options here, straight across and arcing. In this case it doesn't pick out very many letters to use in the transition. Arcing works a little bit better. So now when I play from one to the other... create this nice kind of text transition. It's great for coming from one point that's a text to another point that kind of opposes it in some way or adds to it. 
Using the anagram transition really depends on the two pieces of text that you're transitioning between. Something that's very short doesn't share very many letters isn't going to look good but something where there's maybe a slight change in the lettering will look really good.
So I hope you found these 2 transitions useful... till next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 660: Magic Move and Anagram Transitions In Keynote”

Grace

12 years ago

Hi, I truly hope you can help me!

I am trying to import a quicktime movie into Keynote. The movie is about 3 minutes. The first 30 secs has video plus audio; the middle section is all audio and the last 20 secs is video plus audio. The middle section follows the slides I created on Keynote. To resolve the issue of hearing 2 audio tracks, I turned down the volume on the videos which worked but my lips are slightly out of sync. A few other issues came up: 1. When I started to play with transitions, I would lose some text or images 2. My video in the 1st section stopped playing too soon. 3. Some of the slides are now blank when I play it even though the images and text are still there.
Perhaps there is a simpler way for me to accomplish what I am trying to do...use some life video footage combined with slides and an audio track?

Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

I would keep working with it. Maybe start over. It looks like you just need to get the hang of it. The one piece of advice I have is that if the 3 minute video is divided into different things (30 secs, then audio-only, then 20 secs) then I would chop that into 3 different videos and put them on 3 different slides.

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MacMost Now 660: Magic Move and Anagram Transitions In Keynote

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 660: Magic Move and Anagram Transitions In Keynote”

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