Bring your Keynote presentations to life with music and videos [Tutorial]

Adding audio and video to a presentation can make all the difference between a good one and a great one. Images and text alone are often not enough to engage and capture the imagination of your audience when presenting information via a slideshow, such as those that you can create in Keynote. Simply adding a soundtrack and/or some movie clips can help to add pace, interest and dynamism to an otherwise static project. By following the few simple steps in this tutorial, you can learn not only how to add music and videos, but also how to edit your resources to suit the tone of your presentation, such as adding subtle background music from start to finish, or creating something more dramatic to add punch to a particular slide.

1: Open the Media Browser

When your presentation is complete, add music to the entire project by opening the Media Browser, located in the top-left corner of the interface.

2: Pick some audio

Select the Audio tab at the top and you will find all the music that you have stored in iTunes and GarageBand. Double-click a track to preview it.

3: Importing audio

When you have chosen the song/sound, open the Document window and select the Audio tab. Then drag and drop the file into the well (see above).

4: Show-stealing slides

To add audio files to particular slides, rather than the entire presentation, just drag and drop the file from the Media Browser directly onto the relevant slide.

5: Editing audio

Modify the file to play only a small snippet by opening the QuickTime pane and moving the pointer on the Start & Stop time slidebar.

6: Adding video clips

Incorporating movies into a presentation is just as simple. Go to the Movies tab within the Media Browser and find the video you want to include.

7: Drag and drop

Double-click on the movie clip to preview it. When you have found the clip you’re looking for, drag and drop the file directly onto the slide.

8: Size matters

To resize the frame to fit the slide, just click on the file, grab the handle bars and drag. You can hold down the Cmd key to add a slight rotation too.

9: Finishing touch

Finally, wrap up your slideshow by adding a frame to your movie clip. Just pick a style from the Stroke drop- down menu and your slideshow is ready to roll…

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