iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Adding Movies

Add a little motion to your picture show by screening a movie. Keynote lets you add video to your presentation—if you’re feeling avant garde, you can even add several movies per slide (though the performance you get with multiple movies depends on your computer’s processing power).

To add a touch of the silver screen to your computer screen, click the toolbar’s Media button to open the Media Browser, and click the Movies tab. Choose a movie, and drag it onto the slide canvas. The Media Browser shows only movies you’ve stored in iPhoto, iMovie, and your Movies folder. Add other movies by dragging their icons from a folder on your hard drive onto the slide canvas, or select Insert → Choose to browse to a file on your computer.

Keynote’s media placeholders (Inserting Photos and Other Graphics) welcome movies as well as pictures. When you drop a movie onto a placeholder, Keynote sizes and positions the movie to fit into the placeholder’s border as closely as possible, adding picture frames, shadows, reflections, and any other effects the placeholder might carry with it. However, Keynote doesn’t crop and squeeze movies to make them fill the entire dimensions of the placeholder as it does with pictures; the movie always keeps its same relative proportions.

Wherever you drop the movie on the slide, it becomes a regular object—just like a picture or shape—and you can resize, rotate, add a shadow, or change its opacity just like any other object. Resize the movie by dragging one ...