Videos insterted into Keynote Lost linkage when Relaunch Program

I have spoken about this issue with Apple top level support for over 15 hours over months and months of back and forth. They have replicated this bug themselves on their own machines. They admit it is a problem. That was over a year ago, and STILL they have not fixed this HORRIBLE BUG.

Many times minutes before a presentation all my hard work to get videos set just how they need to be (starting and stopping at certain times) this bug kicks in and RUINS my presentations.

UNBELIEVABLE that they will not fix this. It shows a shockingly low concern for quality and their users.

Same exact story for me. I am a professor too.

It is untenable to use Keynote until they fix this problem. I alerted them to this problem and they admit it exists (they can replicate it internally), but they refuse to fix it.

They claim that it is uncommon for people to embed large videos in presentations, so this is not a priority for them!

Same for me—I'm a professor too. This is a real pain. I have a repository of lectures with videos which I put together in various ways for different audiences. My videos aren't very big: a few minutes each but I use lots of them. The point of having a repository is that you can update a video once and it is updated in all the lectures that use it. To get round this problem I show the old lectures in the old version of Keynote but it gets complicated switching from one version with a very different interface to the other.

At least they could find out why it is happening and tell us, so we can see if there is a way to organise a workaround, apart from embedding the videos in the presentation.

Same complaint as the rest of you. I am a Business School Prof and I regularly use Keynote with linked videos. I love Keynote ... except for this terrible bug 😮which has cost me hours of extra work resetting video links and reselecting desired portions of videos.

Today I made an interesting discovery which may or may not provide a general solution. Videos that have the .mov suffix appear to retain their links, while movies with .mp4 suffix are prone to "losing" their links when you save and then reopen a keynote file. I haven't yet tried other movie formats, but for some of you this solution might help. I will experiment further and keep you posted.

If you have movies with an .mp4 suffix then open it using good old "Quicktime Player.

Go to File -> Export -> [preferred resolution] say 720p... (I usually use the highest available although 720 and even 480 are generally fine for presentations).

Choose file name and destination. I usually keep the same file name and location, because it should automatically append the .mov suffix which keeps it separate from the original .mp4 movie file. Then "Save."

The resulting movie should essentially be identical to the original, except that it is now wrapped in a .mov file format "container." Keynote seems to be happier with this.

Insert and if necessary "trim" the .mov video within your Keynote presentation. Hopefully this link will now persist through subsequent saves and further edits.

All the best 😎

I lose all videos, even those with .mov extensions. So, unfortunately that is not a fix. Are you sure those do not end up broken for you?

For me, the .MOV fix works for a while, until it stops working: at that point MOV files won't work and MP4 files will work -- this is truly a bizarre and infuriating bug.

(and to chime in, I'm also a professor and this has really impacted my ability to do lectures using Keynote).

Why does Tim Cook hate educators? 😉

I should also add that the problem seems better after a reboot, e.g. I can reboot, add movie files to a keynote presentation, and it works fine. After a "while" (hours? days?) the problem will show up again, and rebooting helps (although rebooting does not fix the broken links: once the videos are lost, they are lost and need to be manually re-inserted).

Exactly the same problem. I'm a film professor and I've used Keynote for more than 10 years, with tons of students and professors asking me for the name of the software I used for my lessons. It hasn't happened in the past 2 years because of this bug. If this is "NOT a concern" for you, Apple...

The incredibly slow response in addressing this issue is exactly what is slowly but steadily damaging the reputation of the company, particularly in the educational field.

Everyone that has this problem should post here. The more people that mention the problem and describe how much it disrupts their professional lives (and how they are considering switching away from Apple as a result), the more pressure there will be on them to fix it.

I happen to know they are actively monitoring this thread trying to assess how much of a priority it is to fix this bug.

Same here. Just had the most embarrassing experience in front of 150 other doctors. The odd part is that the first video of my presentation actually worked, but none of the others... All of them were .mov, by the way...

As many others here, I did not move or rename any file. Just closed keynote late at night with everything running smoothly and reopened it the next morning. All but one video had become a proxy still.

Keynote 6.1

El Captain

Very, very disappointed. Going back to Powerpoint.

The ideal would be for the links to work like Mac aliases so if a linked file was moved or its name changed the link would remain. In old versions of Keynote, if a video was moved, the program would look for it and relink it. It could take a long time if it was searching a big disk, but in the end it would find it.

gillian smith1 wrote:

The ideal would be for the links to work like Mac aliases so if a linked file was moved or its name changed the link would remain. In old versions of Keynote, if a video was moved, the program would look for it and relink it. It could take a long time if it was searching a big disk, but in the end it would find it.

I want to emphasize that this is NOT the problem being discussed. In normal usage, Keynote does seem to track moved files as expected.

The problem discussed in this thread is when Keynote malfunctions and completely loses track of ALL video files, even when none of them have moved.

OK, I hadn't realised this works as it used to.

Then there are two problems:

1 as you say, videos completely disappear after closing and reopening the file;

2 when opened, presentations built in earlier versions of Keynote can't find the video links and it is not possible to reinsert them..

I feel your pain...

By the way, I don't think it has anything to do with the.mov extension as, among the many things I tried:

1) I exported every single movie to H264 with .mp4 extension;

2) I re-created a brand new presentation from scratch and re-added the .mp4 movies;

The same issue occurred.

Here's my "solution" to suffer and muddle through until apple fixes this:

1. Don't have giant keynote files (yes, it's handy to do an entire semester's worth of lectures in one file, but that just amplifies the pain). Use a separate presentation for each Week or Chapter that you plan.
2. Keep a copy of QuickTime 7.
3. When you get the dreaded "movies couldn't be found" error...
4. Open all impacted MP4 files in QT7 Player, covert it to MOV files
5. REBOOT (this seems important)
6. In Keynote, Replace Movie File and switch to the MOV versions.

Later, this will happen AGAIN, at which point:

1. REBOOT
2. In Keynote, Replace Movie File and switch to the MP4 versions.

Insane, right? But we need to get our jobs done. This works for me as a stopgap.