Working with Keynote (Mac) Presentations

[TakeOneDigital]

I had a client that built their presentation for a gala all in Keynote. Since I'm running the show on my TC Studio, I (smartly) decided to hook up my Mac via iVGA and bench-test it before rolling to the show site. BAD RESULTS. I'm not sure what's different between iVGA PC and Mac, but the Mac updated the screen like once a second or two. It was WAY behind and none of the transitions or animations came through. I tried everything... turning off wi-fi services, downres-ing the screen, network switch or no network switch... no dice. Stills looked fine, but it was maybe 1 frame per second.

BUT, on my PC, I get like 10-15 frames per second and things look plenty acceptable to run iVGA in full-res to my projectors. Hmm... I thought, "I wish there was only a way to get Keynote to run on my PC." Then one of my genius employees came up with an idea... out put the Keynote as a QuickTime movie! We did that at full screen res and you know what, it works on my PC AWESOME! The file was made quickly and includes ALL animations and transitions and it's small. Best of all, the slides are actually chapter markers in the QT movie. You advance slides JUST LIKE POWERPOINT. The only drawback is that you can't 10-key and jump to a slide like in PPT.

I hope that this is useful for you all. Next time a presenter shows up to your tech table with a Mac and wants to use Keynote, just hop into the program and export the movie. Thumbdrive it to your PPT PC and open the QT movie. You'll be in business.

Let me know what you think!:thumbsup:

[GoldenCoast]

Useful post, T1.

BTW, Keynote will output QT, PPT and Flash files. (Warning: YMMV depending on the version of Keynote and - assuming PPT output - the version of PPT that you're using on the PC)

As I mentioned in another post, we have a love-hate relationship with iVGA: love it when it works properly, hate it when it misbehaves.

Our workaround is to split the feed coming from the computer (PC or Mac) and put one of the signals into a VGA-to-Svideo converter, run Cat5/6 from there to a Ethernet/Svideo balun, and feed that into a camera input on the tricaster.

Upside: Full motion video, no lagging PPT or Keynote transitions, no black screen because the laptop / iVGA went to sleep.

Downside: we have to give up one camera input, and it takes a few minutes more to set up the laptop-to-Tricaster feed, plus we own about $100 worth of extra gear (splitter, converter, balun) that could provide another potential for failure.

But as long as the presenter has a way to feed a VGA signal, we're good to go.

Cheers,
George

[csandy]

I thought the "keynote option" in iVGA mac would work out, but it hasn't for me.

Also, with the suggestion above, be mindful of missing fonts....