Glitching Quicktime movies in Keynote. Nvidia problem

I have noticed this same problem while using a quicktime movie within a keynote during a school play. Not only does the flash occur during playback of the file, but also occurs after the file has finished playing. This has forced me to put an extra blank slide without a quicktime movie in order to prevent the flashing between videos.

I have not tried replicating this issue with other formats, but will try this soon in the future. It appears to only happen when the projector is plugged in, but I have not checked to see whether it occurs on the Macbook LCD or not.

By the way, because this seems to occur on a Macbook with no graphics card, it seems that it must be an issue with OS X or Keynote. (Likely a problem with the new Keynote).

We're having a similar problem at our church. Videos in Keynote will stutter on playback. It was so bad during a recent service that we had to ditch the videos altogether. We have a 256 MB Radeon video card, so I don't think that's the problem. We thought it might be the new Keynote, so we went back to Keynote '07 with no luck.

This has become a real problem for us. We're getting a lot of calls to get a PC for our presentations. This is a bad thing. Does anyone know why this would be happening?

I have the same problem on an iMac G5 1.8GHZ. It doesn't necessarily occur with every mov video in a presentation. I have not tested it on my Santa Rosa MacBook yet.

I have all the newest updated applications. That's Leopard, Quicktime Pro and Keynote. When I import film clips from Quicktime Pro into Keynote everything works fine. When I play the slide I gain random flashes in during the play. When I replay the slide I get flashes, but in different places.
Seems like a Keynote issue. Is someone working on this. MS Powerpoint for Mac doesn't seem to have the same problem, but who wants to go to that extreme?

I've had my Mac for less than a week, and the same glitches were happening on a looping Quicktime in Keynote v4.0.1 and 4.0.2.

I talked to a tech in Apple Care. He had me open a new Keynote presentation and import a movie. I chose 1280x720. The offending movie loop was that size, too. No glitch!!

Conclusion: The Nvidia card seems to not like Quicktime movies resized within Keynote.

Afterwords, I resized the original presentation that had the looping glitch to the QT movie size, and the glitch went away.

So... it seems your presentation size and movie size need to match.

This may only be unique to Keynote v4.0.1/4.0.2 and the new MacBook Pros with the Nvidia 8600M GT card.

A colleague was able to run the original presentation size - 960x540 with 1280x720 QTs scaled down on a new iMac 24"/ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with no glitch.
This tells me that the ATI card is more robust.

However, this is not a hard thing to adjust and watch out for in the new MacBook Pros w/Nvidia.

This testing involved importing PC PPT 2003 files into Keynote. Most of the transitions moved over well, and the show ran nicely. Animating Logo loops were added from After Effects.

Keynote is a very nice program, and will be a welcome addition for high-end presentations.

This is my first Mac in over 10 years, and I'm pretty happy with it.
Hats off to AppleCare for the help.

I've been having the same problems with video in keynote. I recently imported the video file into imovie and then went to share with quicktime. Under compress movie I went to expert settings. I then clicked on share which takes you to another window. Click on options and under video click on size. You can then make the movie the size for your presentation. I did this and it worked fine in keynote. Hopefully the problems with keynote can be addressed, but this has been a temporary fix for me.

I'm running a 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro with GeForce 8600M GT video and 2GB RAM and I, too, had been having the same problem with resized Quicktime videos glitching during playback in Keynote 4. (Resized movies in Keynote 3 had been fine.) This has been a real problem since I rely on my MacBook for professional presentations.

I took the advice above and had my Quicktime files re-exported to the finished size needed for my slides, dragged and dropped the new (larger) files into my Keynote presentation, and everything worked perfectly. Moral of the story: until Apple fixes this problem, you may not want to resize your Quicktime files in Keynote.

I have had a similar problem, QT movies play fine stand alone. But when playing on second display movies often, but maddeningly, not always skip but even hang up. I have reduced the incidence by making movies much smaller down to 800 kb/sec but it still happens. I have tried and tested at 4PM one day and it works fine, and the next day with same MacBookPro and same projector the same movie slide hangs up. This has taken all the bloom off the lily that Keynote was for me. Any other solutions. Mac geniuses don't live up to their name on this one either, they seem clueless.

ANY OTHER IDEAS? OR IS THIS A KEYNOTE PROBLEM THAT APPLE HAS TO FIX?

QT new update was released tonight maybe it will fix these problems.
Good luck
Mireille

If you have an external drive, you might try moving your media and presentations to it and running the Keynote from there. Not sure why, but running it off of the startup disk was causing problems on multiple computers. Once we moved Keynote presentations (not the Application, just the files) to an external drive, we had no more video playback issues.

thanks very much. I tried this today in my lecture and it worked perfectly. Now I think I might be able to go back and increase the resolution of some movies. It is a bizarre phenomena, and why this approach solves it is mysterious to me but it sure works.

Perhaps the boot disk is doing something behind the scenes than for some nanosecond takes enough processing power away from the dual projection that causes the video to hang. As Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) in the National Lampoon Vacation movies would say "who knows?"

I hope an Apple monitor is watching this discussion to figure out the real fix. Thanks again.

I have a 2nd partition on my hard drive, but not an external drive (since I use my laptop to run the presentations). Will this work to fix the glitches?

Did the new Keynote update (4.0.3) released today fix this?

Keynote 4.0.3 still glitches for me - MacBook Pro 2.2, 128 Mb Nvidia graphics, playing back DV-PAL back from a FW800 RAID drive, OS X 10.5.2, and Quicktime 7.4.5.

Cursory testing makes me hopeful that this workaround might be successful:

• Export DV-PAL Quicktime from Final Cut (720x576 resolution - not quite square pixels, of course).
• Open the export in Quicktime Player (Pro), Window->Show Movie Properties, select video track, then 'Settings'.
• Choose 'High Quality' and 'Deinterlace'
• Save As... a reference movie.
• Close the clip, then re-open it from the reference movie file.
• Return to the video track properties, deselect 'preserve aspect ratio', and enter a resolution of 1024x768 pixels. This both scales the movie, and corrects the aspect for computer playback.
• Save and close the reference movie file.
• Drag the reference movie file into a 1024x768 Keynote presentation. Do not scale it once it's in (it should fill the screen anyway)

It's more than faintly absurd that this works, but so far, fingers crossed, it seems to. The save/open/save routine seems to be required because display size changes aren't saved the first time. I've no idea why.

Good luck!

Folks-
Hi there. My first post on these forums- been a lurker for awhile here.

I can't express what a relief it is that someone is discussing this problem.

I work in marketing for a CE manufacturer where we're reliant to deliver top-qualit presentations and in many cases these presentations must include media assets. I have a fleet of iMacs and MacBooks (both low end and MBP) to deliver these presentations.

We've found KN to be a joy. In fact, we've been able to do the following inside presentations:
+Run HD Video
+Output up to 8 channels of audio for demonstrations of OUR products
+Control lighting (we've tried X10 control but now playing with DMX control from Keynote!).

People get blown away after seeing these presentations. The many presenters only have to think of delivering a great presentation and not all of the technical hub-bub because of the automation that my team (and KN) can deliver.

The only problem we're having however is getting HD video to run smoothly when connected to a HD projector or flat-panel display.

I appreciate the conversation and suggestions here. I'll chime in if I find anything too.

BTW- I've been encoding my HD videos to QT using the DVCPRO HD codec and I seem to get better playback performance then when I was relying on H264.

Kyle Sullivan

Message was edited by: KyleSullivan