Recording Your Keynote-based Presentation
Sometimes, we may find ourselves in a situation where we want to make our presentation (at least the audio part) and slides available for viewing at a later date. Fortunately, Keynote allows you to do this, by recording your presentation with the appropriately named option in the “Play” menu. Unfortunately, Keynote will only take one recording. You can’t piece multiple recordings together. If you’re like me and you feel more comfortable in front of an audience than recording your talk, this can be a problem. If I want to be sure of a clean, error-free recording, then the only reasonable option for me is to record it section by section.
With this limitation of Keynote, I sought to find a solution. The answer I came up with was to use iMovie to put the piecs together.
For the example below, I took the “charts” section of the slide deck I used for a brown bag presentation I gave a few weeks ago. I then broke that section into two: 1) bar charts and 2) pie and line charts. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not as comfortable recording my talk as I am in front of an audience. As such, I’m much more error-prone and required six or more takes for each of the two individual recordings. Neither is as good as I’d hope, but it should be good enough for you to see what I did. As soon as I got a recording that I was willing to live with, I went to the “Share” menu and chose “Export.” From there, I exported my recording to a QuickTime movie. I then cleared my existing recording and followed the same steps for the second recording.
iMovie with 2 clips
Now that I have two QuickTime movies I need to piece them together. iMovie makes this very easy. I started by importing the two clips. Once I did that, I dragged the two clips to the project window. If I needed to, I could have done some editing: cutting off dead space, edited the audio, etc. For this simple example, I merely had one immediately follow the other. Once done with any editing that you intend to do, export or upload your video to any one of the options in iMovie’s “Share” menu.
iMovie surely gives you a great deal of creative and editing options. However, it surely would be great if the more basic capability to piece together partial recordings were in Keynote itself. With that said, if you have Keynote, you are guaranteed to have iMovie (hopefully, the more powerful iMovie ’09) and thus have the ability to record your presentation with the quality you expect.
