MacMost: Keynote

While you can use iMovie or Photos to create slideshows, Keynote is probably the most advanced tool with the most options. You can quickly import many photos onto individual slides. Then you can work with each slide to scale and adjust each photo. You can add text and transitions. You can even create a Ken Burns effect by moving and scaling a photo over time. Once you have perfected your slideshow, you can export it as a video to share. You can also record naration to include in the video.

While Keynote is primarily a presentation tool, you can also animate objects with movement, rotation, opacity and scaling. You can include these animations as part of a presentation, or build them to use as animated GIFs or segments of a video.

You don't need special software to create beautiful organizational charts on your Mac. You can use the shapes in Pages and Keynote along with techniques like groups, images in shapes, and connection lines. Learn the skills you need to build any diagram design.

You can use the Maps app on your Mac for more than just finding locations and getting directions. You can create maps to be used in other apps as well. You can export a map into Preview and then annotate it to send in an email or message. You can copy and paste or export a map to use in Pages documents, Keynote presentations and iMovie video projects. You can also export satellite and 3D views.

You can create your own transitions for iMovie using Keynote. But making simple one or two-slide presentations that include a transparent background, you can export short videos that can be used as overlays in iMovie. These overlays can be applied to become a transition between one clip and another. They can also be customize with graphics to fit your style or theme in the video.

Keynote is a free app from Apple that you can use to build presentations. Learn the basics of adding slides, text, images, transitions and more in just 5 minutes. Also learn how to customize how you present with the Presenter Display and slide notes.

You can use Keynote to create a presentation and then record yourself giving the presentation. Your voice and the timing as you advanced from slide-to-sldie will be recorded. You can then export this as a video. This is a good way to quickly get information into video format for distribution on YouTube and elsewhere.

You can create a fireball in Keynote and then export it as a transparent video. You can then record yourself with QuickTime Player and place the fireball in your hand. It can move with you and you can even throw it if you put the time in to create animation keyframes in iMovie.

The default text transitions in Keynote can be boring and look too familiar to those that see a lot of presentations. You can use some of the options and other creative features of Keynote to make your text transitions unique and interesting.

With standard Mac apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote, you can revert to a previously saved version of the file to retrieve text or items you may have deleted or changed. You can completely revert to the old version, or copy and paste some text from an old version. This also works with TextEdit and some third-party apps.

If you want to go beyond the title text feature in iMovie, you can create your own styled text in Keynote or any image editing tool and use the resulting image as an overlay. Then you can use picture-in-picture keyframes in iMovie to animate the text popping in from one side or scale as it moves. You can use this technique with any transparent image for a variety of effects.

The new image fill feature of text in Pages and Keynote allows you to create some beautiful graphics with very little effort. In this tutorial you'll learn how to create a retro-style postcard image using some of your photos. You can apply a single image fill to all of the text or a separate image for each letter. You can post these graphics online or use them in documents or videos.

The new versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote allow you to fill text using a gradient or an image. You can use linear or radial gradients of two or more colors, change the angle and other options. You can fill with an image stretching that image to fit the text or tiling it across the text. You can also use a new feature to outline text with a line, choosing the line color, style and size.

You can turn any video into an animated GIF using the latest version of Apple's free Keynote presentation software. A new feature of Keynote is the ability to export as a GIF. To convert a video, you can create single-slide presentations using the video and export. You can also easily crop and trim the video, as well as add text or even combine several videos into one GIF.

If you need to focus on part of an image during a presentation, you can use a magnifying glass to zoom in on the area in a fun way. You can build this effect using and shape and three transitions. This also creates a nice element to use in iMovie or other video projects.

You don't need to use complex graphics or video motion tools to create backgrounds for YouTube end screens. Instead, you can simply use Keynote and build a single-slide presentation with animation. It is fairly easy to get elements lined up with placeholders and then to play around with various animations to make your end screen look great. Then you can export as a movie and add it to the end of your YouTube videos as you finish editing them.

Some apps and Final Cut Pro allow you to add a camcorder overlay to make video look like it was recorded on an old video camera. You can do the same in iMovie using an overlay created in Keynote. With this approach, you can highly customize the camcorder overlay. Once you create your Keynote template, you can continue to customize and adjust it for future use.

You can add a motion effect to a 2D photo without buying expensive software. By using Preview to cut a photo into layers and Keynote to animate them, you can make a photo come to life. This simple parallax animation effect can be used on all sorts of photos to create interesting videos or animated GIFs.

The opening and closing slides of a presentation are often on the screen for a while, so why not make them more interesting than just some text? You can easily add a video as a background to a keynote slide. With iMovie you can create a few different backgrounds that you can reuse.

A new feature of Keynote 9 is the ability to export as an animated GIF file. These are useful to upload to social media or send via text message. The exported GIF includes all transitions, animations and special effects.