Simple slideshow

From TreetWiki

Here's a quick technique for creating a simple slideshow for your show, as seen in Designing Worlds, using the Apple Keynote application (their equivalent of, and vastly superior to, Powerpoint). This article assumes you are going to export the file for use in Final Cut Pro and that you are using the Treet Final Cut Pro Setup specifications.

Start by creating a new document in Keynote. Specify the frame size as 720 x 1280 in the pop-up menu bottom right of the gallery page, and select a suitable master slide design from the page. My preference is simply a black background. You may want to delete the text fields and create a master slide that simply has a black background - you will probably want to create a title slide but you can easily do that later on.

Make sure that all your images are sized to 720 x 1280.

Select all the images and drag them to the left sidebar of the Keynote document, which will turn them into slides. Drag them around to get the order you want.

If you're like me, you probably want a nice simple cross-dissolve between slides, in which case you can select them all and choose the transitions section of the palette, then give them all, say, a cross-dissolve of 0.5 seconds. Alternatively, select each slide, one by one, and give them specific transitions as you like.

Don't bother trying to include a music track in the Keynote presentation – it's much easier to do in FCP.

That's the easy bit. The tricky bit is exporting the slideshow with the right settings to bring seamlessly into FCP. Choose the Export option and you'll see this screen:

If you don't see this, check that the QuickTime logo is selected top left.

Select Fixed Timing from the "Playback uses" popup near the top as shown and set suitable slide durations. 5 secs is typical.

In the bottom half of the dialog, click the Format popup and choose Custom. You'll get the following window:

You can choose "No Audio" if it's not set already. Now click Settings in the Video section above.

You will notice immediately you pop up the Compression Type menu that your standard preset for Treet-compatible ProRes422 23.976f/s is not available. Instead, you have to set it manually. Choose Apple ProRes 422, set the frame rate to Custom, and key in 23.976 as the Frame Rate.

Click OK and continue through the export procedure.

You may notice that when you play back the resulting ProRes movie that its frame rate displays as something slightly odd – don't worry. You'll also notice that the exported file is quite large. Again, don't worry: you'll find it will slot into FCP perfectly happily with no need for rendering.

Information and images kindly supplied by Texas Timtam.