How to Use Keynote to Make a DVD

As a summary, here are the basics. I made a DVD from a Keynote file mixed over an audio track which I added to other movie menus made in Keynote to make a coalescing DVD. Basically, I'll be telling you how to make DVD movies from Keynote.

Here is the finished product.

What you need
Here is my setup. I have a dual-processor 1.4Ghz G4 with 512mb RAM (I need more. hah.) The software I use is Keynote 2, Soundtrack, Audacity, and Photoshop.

Step 1: Record Audio and Mix with Music
This was easy. I wrote a script. Recorded my Senior Pastor reading it, then clipped it together with some warm music. I did this in Soundtrack with a voice track and a music track. Save this file with the seperate tracks. You will use it later. More on Soundtrack in a bit. While you are patching this, get pretty familiar with the tempo and movement of the voice-over. It really helps if you can feel how the words are said as you edit the video portion. Get that finalized, then head on over to Keynote.

Step 2: Use Keynote to make a DVD
I made the video part completely in Keynote. Leave it to Apple to create a powerpoint beater that you can make DVDs out of...out of the box. Amazing. I set my slide size as 640x480. (Best for iDVD.) For my music track, I popped in my finished audio voice over file I just compiled. That is sortof a reference point for now. After the export, it will have to be tweaked. I then created the movie with a rough placement of the timings to the audio file. Using all automatic slide transitions and automatic time-delayed, etc motions, I put together various slides and effects. This takes the majority of the time. You have to keep playing with it to get the feel of the movie that you like. The audio only starts at the beginning no matter what slide you are on...there is no "timeline" per se; so that creates a little difficulty. It is simply solved by always playing from your first slide. Or by figuring out where the slide changes occur with what time in your audio. When I had it all worked out nicely, I exported the movie out of Keynote as a quicktime Self-playing movie with 0 second slide lengths and 0 second transitions...this leaves the setting you had in all your slides the same.

Step 3: Sync up the Sound
After I had the Audio and the Video Tracks finalized, I took them both over to Soundtrack. Soundtrack is great. If you are going to be doing any semi-serious work at all, you ought to just go buy Final Cut Express. Soundtrack comes with it. Soundtrack basically allows you to work with a video file and an audio track to sync them up. Everytime Keynote exports my videos it speeds and slows down certain sections. So, there is always some tweaking that has to be done. It is simply easier to tweak the audio. So, I added some pauses in the speaking here and there to make it sync up. With a couple of split tracks here and there on my audio, I got it matched up pretty well. I then saved both tracks as a quicktime, and the major part was done.

Step 4: Make DVD menus
All I have for DVD work is iDVD, so my options were limited with stock menus. But. iDVD just lets you use any quicktime movie as your background, if you so choose. So, I headed back over to Keynote...using a 640x480 slide size, animated a couple of logos for a loopable movie, and exported them to quicktime using the same settings as before. I popped those into iDVD as my background movies, and voila...custom backgrounds.

Step 5: Put it all together and burn
Thats it. Compile your DVD from your source files. Add the DVD menus, add the background music, and burn. All in all, start to finish, this DVD took me in the neighborhood of 18-20 hours to complete. Not too bad. My main goal was that people could use them as a tool to get others excited about our church. I pray the Lord blesses our efforts.