New Dynamic Backgrounds With Mac Keynote

A new feature in Keynote lets you easily place an animated dynamic background behind your slides. You can customize them with your own colors, sizes and movement.

Check out New Dynamic Backgrounds With Mac Keynote at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Dynamic Backgrounds feature in Keynote.
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Apple released a new version of Keynote this week. Version 12.1. You can get it in the Mac App Store and note that you need to be using macOS Big Sur or newer to use the most recent version of the apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Now the big new feature is Dynamic Backgrounds. Now Dynamic Backgrounds can easily be seen here in these 3 new templates that come with Keynote. But you don't need to use these templates at all. You can actually use Dynamic Backgrounds in any template you want or even in an existing Keynote presentation you've already created. 
So I"m actually going to start here with the basic black presentation. In order to access the Dynamic Backgrounds all you need to do is select nothing. Just click on the background to have nothing selected. If you have an item selected, like here, then in the Format sidebar you'll be controlling the item you have selected. But if you click on the background, like that, then the Format sidebar here will just show you things about the background. But now you have the choice between Standard and Dynamic Backgrounds. Standard is just like before. You can choose a color, gradient or image, and Dynamic is the new one. Choose that and you can choose one of these dynamic backgrounds which basically are flowing colors. So you can see there actually are four pages of them here shown by these four dots. So I can move through these and the last page is actually empty for you to add your own customizations. You could click to select which one you  want. 
So this one right here is selected. I could click here to select this one instead. Notice these move. So the background is subtlely moving here as you watch it. That's why they are dynamic. They are always moving. Each one of these is a little bit different. You can go through them all to familiarize yourself with how each one is different. For instance this one has a pattern that is moving towards you like this. Whereas this one has a gradient that is shifting from the top right to the bottom left. This one kind of looks like waves flowing from the right to the left. There is a whole variety of them. So take the time to look at each one to see which one could be the most useful to you. They all have names too. If you move your pointer over them you could see the name. There's Black Smoke. Lime Juice. Solar Flare, etc. 
Now the Preview Motion switch needs to be On or it is just static which is fine if you want it to use less processing power and it's also maybe easier to focus on what it is you're creating if you just have the Preview Off. It will still play when you play the presentation. With Preview off it's just going to be off while you are actually editing your presentation. 
Now whichever one of these you choose, like let's choose this one here, you have these colors. You can move these around and change these. For instance I can change this deep black right here to something else. If I click on it its selected and I can see in the Color Picker here I can easily choose a color. So let's choose this and you can see how that color changes. Let's click here and change to something else, like that. You can use any part of the Color Picker here to adjust that one and kind of make that thing your own. Now I can scroll up here and usually see more. In this case there is Speed, so I can speed this up greatly and you can see how quickly it changes. I can change the height here of the shapes and the peaks, like that. But each one has its own set. So if I go here, for instance, I see a lot more colors and I can adjust the scaling here. I can adjust the angle in this case like that and the speed of movement. I can also, of course, adjust these colors so it will adjust just that part of the rainbow there. Here's this one and you can see all the different colors here. I can adjust the movement. I can even have it go backwards. That's moving back. Adjust the height.  Different this one. I get the colors that are used by the shapes and I also get a background color. So I can change that as well. You can see that tints everything. I can change the speed and amplitude of what's there. 
So there's a lot that you can do to change how each one looked and kind of make it your own instead of looking exactly like somebody else that might be using the same dynamic background. Now if you do make adjustments and you like those adjustments, and you want to keep this and use this again, then all you need to do is go to the last page here, click the Plus button and it will add this here. So all of these settings are now saved in this Preset and you can easily reuse it. I also want to point out that if you're using different backgrounds on different slides, like on the second slide here we'll do dynamic and we'll use this one with colors, the transitions work perfectly. So I'll go back to this first slide here, I'll go to Animate, I'll add a Transition, let's do something like Dissolve, and now you can see how it works right there. If I were to play it and then advance to the next slide with the Spacebar you can see how it nicely goes from on to the other. Both of them animating while it dissolves. 
Now as you can see other elements, like Text, appear on top of this background. Just like a static background. So if you add a shape it's going to be here on top of the background. This is true for images as well. So I can bring in an image here, so you can see here the background animates behind the apple. Notice also that when you have something selected, whether it's text or an image, the Preview pauses there. Probably for performance so it's not taking up all that processing power doing that while you're trying to edit something else. But if you select the background again by clicking away from everything you could see the Preview continues because I have Preview Motion turned On and, of course, when you Play it's going to show the animation. 
So you can also, of course, create a shape that actually has a hole in it to have the background only show through part of a hole. So if I create a box here and stretch it across and then maybe create another shape here, like this circle, select them both and then do Format, and then Shapes & Lines, and Subtract Shapes you could see now I've got that hole right there. The animation for the background is actually playing through that hole. I can switch it to another animation there so you could see it a little clearer. Or I can take a shape and actually put it on top, like this, and notice if I set it to a color but then set its opacity to something semi-transparent then it tints the entire thing as well. Also, this animated background will show up if you export as a video. So I'm going to go to File, Export To, Movie and then I'll just use the Default settings here as an example. I'll Export. I'll Open it up and Play it and you can see there the background is animating. So that means you could actually put one of these backgrounds onto a blank slide. Have that slide play for 60 seconds or something. Export it and then use that background in iMovie if you wanted to. 
So this is an interesting new feature. It definitely gives us something better to use as a background for our presentations. In the next few years I would expect to see a lot of presentations created using these backgrounds and also a lot of videos shared to YouTube created in Keynote as well. So play around with these and see if you could use them in your next presentation. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “New Dynamic Backgrounds With Mac Keynote”

Juris Ozols

2 months ago

Gary - Very nice tutorial, appreciate it as always. Question - is there some way to add some text, make it transparent, and mask out the rest of the slide so that the dynamic background is only visible through the text part?

Gary Rosenzweig

Juris: Not that I can think of offhand. You could do it by building that graphic in a graphics app like Pixelmator or Photoshop, and then just covering the slide with it.

Yep, that works fine with Photoshop, creating a png image with a solid background and a transparent hole. Also, playing around with PS Chroma Keying plus the Keynote dynamic backgrounds exported to movies can make for some intriguing effects. Thank you, sir!

New Dynamic Backgrounds With Mac Keynote

Comments: 3 Responses to “New Dynamic Backgrounds With Mac Keynote”

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