Importing MPEG 4 Movie into Keynote 2

Question

Importing MPEG 4 Movie into Keynote 2

After spending 5 days trying to import MPEG 4 video from a Canon Optura 500 videocam, I have learned:

Can't be done. Calling Apple help today, confirmed no possible solution to get the movies into Keynote. I tried everything and read all help information in Keynote and imovie.

What I did for a do or die presentation: Import clip from camera (no editing allowed, as your edits will be lost on transfer) into imovie, copy and paste from imovie to keynote 2, copy and paste from Keynote 2 to POWERPOINT!

click on movie on a powerpoint slide and click view, click custom animation, click on your clip and click extras, pick play on click, and you can now play your MPEG4 movie in a slide show.

An apple rep once told me, in an Apple store, that "Keynote was Powerpoint on steroids". See how bad steroids are for you.

Posted on Sep 25, 2005 6:53 PM

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Answer 1

Brian Peat

Level 6

18,216 points

Sep 25, 2005 7:38 PM in response to Michael Morris, MD

sigh...while Keynote is an amazing product, the Apple store workers tend to over hype it, to the point of making it sound like it has EVERy feature of PPT, when it's really missing a ton of stuff still. Visually though, I have to agree, it makes PPT look like a toy.

That said, I'm trying to figure out what exactly your process was, and what did and didn't work. I looked up the specs on the 500, and it appears that while you can shoot in true DV format onto mini DV tape, it also shoots Mpeg4 onto the photo card. Is this what you shot in (as opposed to DV format onto tape)? If so, I'm trying to figure out how you even got it into iMovie as opposed to iPhoto, which is what you use to import movies from a media card. Also, I don't understand your comment on edits getting lost.

Next, your use of the term slide show is confusing, but I THINK what you'd like is to see the movie sitting there on a poster frame until you want it to play, and then click to make it play. You can do this to an extent, but you have to work around a few missing features in Keynote. Keynote STILL won't let you leave the poster frame showing on the slide and then have the movie play on a click...you'll actually see NOTHING until you trigger the movie as you have to add a build to the movie, and until it builds, you won't see the thing. The work around is to grab a frame of the movie and paste it onto the slide, then build the movie in right on top of it.

I hope that helps. If you can give more details on what you did and what you TRIED to do, and what you want to end up with, I can try to help you figure it out.

EDIT: ah, I see this in a review "Playback of media from the card and the tape is available in playback mode, as is recording to a VCR or a digital video (DV) device using a FireWire cable." which means you "should" be able to import into iMovie. The real draw back is you're working with mpeg4 and not DV...and Mpeg4 is REALLY compressed, not a good format to use if you plan to edit it as you'll have to decompress and recompress, losing quality (DV is also compressed, but not nearly as much).

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Answer 2

Sep 25, 2005 8:02 PM in response to Michael Morris, MD

I wasted time on the SD card recordings. The MPEG file is split into audio and video and wont transfer together. I spoke to Canon about this. I did get the MPEG 4 to run on a Windows machine, with a audio plug in I was directed to by Microsoft.

What I was trying to do: import a MPEG 4 video from my camera into imovie, edit the movie resulting in clips and transitions, and dropping that imovie file into a Keynote 2 slide. I am producing a slide presentation with patient interviews for teaching physicians.

The imovie file is not recognized by Keynote as an "importable" file.

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Answer 3

Brian Peat

Level 6

18,216 points

Sep 26, 2005 6:06 AM in response to Michael Morris, MD

Hmmm. If you managed to get a clip into iMovie, there's no reason it shouldn't work in Keynote. How did you export it from iMovie?

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Answer 4

Kyn Drake

Level 7

21,597 points

Sep 26, 2005 6:57 AM in response to Michael Morris, MD

Just wondering, have you been to this page?
http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=DownloadDetailAct&fcategoryid=22 7&modelid=9371

It's my opinion that most of the problems people have with MPEG4 and the Mac/QuickTime is because to get a quick solution out, the vendor in question has used the non-standard Microsoft MPEG4 variant. Since Microsoft made it, it'll play back in Windows with no problem BUT not in QuickTime because QuickTime adheres to the standard. It appears that Canon, has released a codec for OSX on this page that SHOULD allow Canon encoded MPEG4 to play just like any other QuickTime movie. If you give it a try, post back and let us know if it worked for you.

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