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kickahaYou know, one of the fun things about being Steve Jobs' bitch is that I keep finding cool-assed shit on my system.
I use Keynote for presentations. It's like PowerPoint, but, y'know... nice. Yesterday I was noodling how to best present some material from my research, and I thought that a 3D representation of the design space would really nail it home and give the audience a visual to keep homing in on for orientation of what we were talking about next.
So basically, all I needed was a 3D animation suite inside my slide presentation app. Now, if this were MS, they'd have some half-assed attempt at this *inside* PowerPoint, with wizards and such.
Keynote doesn't even have what you could call decent 2D drawing tools - they're okay for simple things, but not so great for complex diagrams.
And here's where it gets fun...
I grabbed Google SketchUp on jason0x21's recommendation, and mocked up a 3D environment. I set up a couple of key frames, and told it to Export the animation as a QuickTime movie. Oh, and please make the background transparent.
Dragged and dropped the movie into Keynote, and voila. Done. 3D animation in my slides, and until it starts moving, it just looks like a nice image. No controller slider, no frame, nothing. It's *gorgeous*.
Okay, so that's cool thing #1, but I wasn't really surprised - I'm used to being able to share data between apps without too much pain. That's one of the things I adore about the Mac.
In Keynote, I'm looking at it, thinking, "Okay, this is fantastic, but this sucks if someone wants me to send them the slides as a 'transcription'." See, I'm with Edward Tufte on this - most PowerPoint presentations suck rotten rhino rectum, because people are using them for two very different tasks at once: as a presentation, and as a transcript. A presentation is best done live, with interaction, and with the slides being supplementary material to the speaker. A transcript has to stand on its own. It used to be that two documents were created for these two tasks, but somewhere along the way, PP became the de facto standard for both, and the end result is suckage. Ubiquitous bullet point lists that are just read by the presenter (in which case, why have a freaking presenter??), but that aren't quite enough to actually provide context *without* a presenter. They fail at both tasks.
So my talks tend to be full of animations, single images on screen that I'll talk around/about for two minutes, this sort of thing. ie, the slides by themselves are useless as a transcription. It's all very dynamic, and frankly, a hell of a lot more fun for everyone than if I just stood there and dully read what was on the screen.
Unfortunately, I need that transcription. So I've been thinking about how I'd write it up - do I want to just write down what I'd say, with [click] in appropriate places? Hmm. Maybe, but... seems kind of bleah. It also requires people to have Keynote, since PowerPoint can't handle many of the animations that I use. Oops. That's not going to fly.
I'm sitting there thinking "It'd be nice if I could record the presentation as I give it..." Hmm.
I look under the File menu and see "Record Slideshow". Huh. Click.
The slides start playing as if I were presenting, complete with presenter's notes, except for a small red Record icon in one corner of the screen. Nice. It looks like its snagging the timing of what I'm doing, and all that. Excellent. I'm mumbling to myself, and I say out loud, "It'd be nice if this were recording what I'm *saying*..." I stop the recording.
Okay, cool, now I'm back to where I was, and... wait... under "Export" I see the menu item "Send To..." with a submenu with a list to export the recording to iMovie, iTunes, iWeb or... GarageBand? Er... I say GarageBand for the hell of it. It pops up a dialog asking me if I want to use a fixed timing for the slides, or the recorded timing. I think I'll go with the latter, thanks...
And boom. I have a movie track of the presentation as *I* stepped through it... and a separate audio track of my mumbling to myself, saying "It'd be nice if this were recording what I'm saying..."
Holy shit. Instant podcast. Videocast. WHATEVER you want to call it.
I can record myself rehearsing, and review, post it to a website, whatever the hell I want. When someone asks for the slides, I can send them a goddamned *movie* of my audio over the slides, or point them to it online.
This is just stupid slick. Cripes, I could have *really* used this when I was teaching. Seriously, flinx, or anyone else out there who does lectures... you need this. Do your presentation, live in class, and export to the class website?? Holy crapinolies? No video of you or the class, but it beats the *PANTS* off of raw slides. And actually, I just realized something - if you *do* happen to have a live video of the talk, you can toss that into iMovie as one track, this as another, and go back and forth at will, or picture-in-picture... jeez.
(BTW, I just went back and checked... another option in the Send To list for the recording? YouTube. *twitch*)
I use Keynote for presentations. It's like PowerPoint, but, y'know... nice. Yesterday I was noodling how to best present some material from my research, and I thought that a 3D representation of the design space would really nail it home and give the audience a visual to keep homing in on for orientation of what we were talking about next.
So basically, all I needed was a 3D animation suite inside my slide presentation app. Now, if this were MS, they'd have some half-assed attempt at this *inside* PowerPoint, with wizards and such.
Keynote doesn't even have what you could call decent 2D drawing tools - they're okay for simple things, but not so great for complex diagrams.
And here's where it gets fun...
I grabbed Google SketchUp on jason0x21's recommendation, and mocked up a 3D environment. I set up a couple of key frames, and told it to Export the animation as a QuickTime movie. Oh, and please make the background transparent.
Dragged and dropped the movie into Keynote, and voila. Done. 3D animation in my slides, and until it starts moving, it just looks like a nice image. No controller slider, no frame, nothing. It's *gorgeous*.
Okay, so that's cool thing #1, but I wasn't really surprised - I'm used to being able to share data between apps without too much pain. That's one of the things I adore about the Mac.
In Keynote, I'm looking at it, thinking, "Okay, this is fantastic, but this sucks if someone wants me to send them the slides as a 'transcription'." See, I'm with Edward Tufte on this - most PowerPoint presentations suck rotten rhino rectum, because people are using them for two very different tasks at once: as a presentation, and as a transcript. A presentation is best done live, with interaction, and with the slides being supplementary material to the speaker. A transcript has to stand on its own. It used to be that two documents were created for these two tasks, but somewhere along the way, PP became the de facto standard for both, and the end result is suckage. Ubiquitous bullet point lists that are just read by the presenter (in which case, why have a freaking presenter??), but that aren't quite enough to actually provide context *without* a presenter. They fail at both tasks.
So my talks tend to be full of animations, single images on screen that I'll talk around/about for two minutes, this sort of thing. ie, the slides by themselves are useless as a transcription. It's all very dynamic, and frankly, a hell of a lot more fun for everyone than if I just stood there and dully read what was on the screen.
Unfortunately, I need that transcription. So I've been thinking about how I'd write it up - do I want to just write down what I'd say, with [click] in appropriate places? Hmm. Maybe, but... seems kind of bleah. It also requires people to have Keynote, since PowerPoint can't handle many of the animations that I use. Oops. That's not going to fly.
I'm sitting there thinking "It'd be nice if I could record the presentation as I give it..." Hmm.
I look under the File menu and see "Record Slideshow". Huh. Click.
The slides start playing as if I were presenting, complete with presenter's notes, except for a small red Record icon in one corner of the screen. Nice. It looks like its snagging the timing of what I'm doing, and all that. Excellent. I'm mumbling to myself, and I say out loud, "It'd be nice if this were recording what I'm *saying*..." I stop the recording.
Okay, cool, now I'm back to where I was, and... wait... under "Export" I see the menu item "Send To..." with a submenu with a list to export the recording to iMovie, iTunes, iWeb or... GarageBand? Er... I say GarageBand for the hell of it. It pops up a dialog asking me if I want to use a fixed timing for the slides, or the recorded timing. I think I'll go with the latter, thanks...
And boom. I have a movie track of the presentation as *I* stepped through it... and a separate audio track of my mumbling to myself, saying "It'd be nice if this were recording what I'm saying..."
Holy shit. Instant podcast. Videocast. WHATEVER you want to call it.
I can record myself rehearsing, and review, post it to a website, whatever the hell I want. When someone asks for the slides, I can send them a goddamned *movie* of my audio over the slides, or point them to it online.
This is just stupid slick. Cripes, I could have *really* used this when I was teaching. Seriously, flinx, or anyone else out there who does lectures... you need this. Do your presentation, live in class, and export to the class website?? Holy crapinolies? No video of you or the class, but it beats the *PANTS* off of raw slides. And actually, I just realized something - if you *do* happen to have a live video of the talk, you can toss that into iMovie as one track, this as another, and go back and forth at will, or picture-in-picture... jeez.
(BTW, I just went back and checked... another option in the Send To list for the recording? YouTube. *twitch*)