Animated GIFs don't loop in exported movies from Keynote 3

Question

Animated GIFs don't loop in exported movies from Keynote 3

I am just getting started with Keynote 3.0 and really like what I have seen. I created a series of slides and pasted animated GIFs in various places. They are set to loop on each slide as Keynote presents the slides. The slide show has preset transition and build timings and there is music playing continuously, throughout the show. It works quite well. (However, there is very intermittent choppy audio and video playback when there are builds or transitions occurring. Any thoughts on optimizing this?)

The problems begin when I ask Keynote to export the slideshow to a movie. The main problem that I am struggling with is that the animated GIFs don't loop in the rendered movie, regardless of which compressor I choose. I don't see anything in the documentation. I have also searched several of the discussions on making movies from Keynote 3 but have not specifically seen animated GIFs discussed. What am I missing here?

Also, I want to be able to play this movie on a DVD player at an upcoming function. Any recommendations for an approach that will be best? I have QT 7 Pro and the iLife '06 suite.

Thanks, in advance, for any forthcoming suggestions.

eMac G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6) 1.25 GHz, 1 GB RAM

Posted on May 9, 2006 12:27 AM

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Answer 1

Brian Peat

Level 6

18,216 points

May 9, 2006 6:01 AM in response to Richard Girton

My suggestion is to take those gifs into something like Fireworks and copy and paste frames until you get something that loops on its own, as in, it appears to loop, but it's just continuing to play out through all its frames. What you're seeing is what Keynote does, ignore looping gifs on mov export.

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Answer 2

May 16, 2006 1:39 AM in response to Brian Peat

Thanks Brian. I ended up just playing the slides in Keynote 3 and it worked well. I did some extra reading on Apple's Quicktime 7 site and reviewed some of the tutorials for iLife 06 and am beginning to understand this video stuff some. I have a lot more to learn, however. I wonder why Keynote doesn't export the animated gifs. What is the technical barrier?

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Answer 3

Brian Peat

Level 6

18,216 points

May 16, 2006 6:24 AM in response to Richard Girton

My guess is, it's too much of a pain to have to calculate how many times it will actually loop and create the loops and then composite everything. Running it in Keynote just tells the thing to keep playing over and over till you do something that stops it. There's a BIG difference there as one is just being told to play, the other is having to be placed in a movie with an exact number of frames, so there are a bunch of calculations involved.

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Answer 4

Kyn Drake

Level 7

21,597 points

May 16, 2006 9:45 AM in response to Brian Peat

And probably a sprite or two 😉

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