Using Keynote and Garageband

Creating a podcast

These are instructions to create a podcast using Keynote and Garageband. While it’s called a podcast, and can be exported to iTunes podcast format, it can also be viewed as a regular movie. The convenience of fulfilling Apple format is that their tools all work together. The filesize is also smaller than if you’re using many other options. (Note: if you follow this up with adding a watermark afterwards, the filesize will probably jump up anyways.)

The limitation is that the slides must be SQUARE! So you really want to know this upfront. BUT, once it’s square, it will not look pretty in YouTube (see below)!

These are the steps from the video in CrunchEd, available free on iTunes. But, rather than rewatching it everytime, this is my cribsheet.

  1. In Keynote: Make your presentation
    • Start a new presentation using whatever template you prefer.
    • Set the slide size. Use “View»Show Inspector”, then in the Inspector window, click the first icon across the top bar that looks like a mini-keynote icon. Near the bottom of the window there is “Slide Size”. In the dropdown menu, select “Custom slide size” and set it to 600 by 600.
    • Make your slides as usual. If you make the text too small, they won’t really be readable on an iPod screen (if you intend your viewers to ever use iPods).
  2. In Garageband: Create your audio voiceover
    • Create a new file selecting “New Project” and the type as “Podcast”
    • Create an audio track. Select your gender (not sure why this matters, but maybe something to do with the equalization) and start recording (using the red button). Use your Keynote slides as prompts. I find it helpful to type in what I’m planning to say in the “presenter notes”. Stop, pause, delete, re-record as necessary.
    • Import your keynote slides. With both Keynote and Garageband open, select each slide, and drop it into the “Podcast Artwork” track at the right places. By moving the little triangle at the top, and then clicking the Artwork in the podcast track header at the left, you can preview the transitions to be sure you have them where you want them. I put a little deadspace (no audio) between slides, and then just align my change in slides with the start of the new audio.
    • More advanced edits. Optional: you can set the equalization of your audio track to clean up noise, etc.

  3. Export your podcast. In Garageband, select “Share»Export podcast to Disk”. This will create a movie of .m4a format, which is viewable by Quicktime, etc.

  4. Bug?: Annoyingly, at the moment, if I export to iTunes instead, as “Share»send podcast to iTunes”, the “Artwork” which is my slides don’t show up when I play the podcast. I’m not sure if they would on an iPod, but I’d really prefer it to work on a computer as well. So for the moment, exporting just to video.

Download the output here. Note, opening in Quicktime shows the slide artwork: podcast_test_export2disk

One of the obnoxious things is that the *.m4a format that Garageband creates is tagged as an ‘audio’ file, and not directly uploadable to, for instance, Youtube. So I’ve not converted it to *.m4v using Quicktime 7: podcast_test_export2disk_toweb – Wi-Fi

The obnoxious thing about the square format (600×600) is that it doesn’t display nicely in Youtube: Link to YouTube video

What’s worse is that the slides and audio are now out-of-sync. I don’t really know what to do about that Here is the fix: Audio/Video out of sync. Most of the time I’ll be uploading to a Blackboard website within the university webpages as the *m4v format.