For my presentation at Pecha Kucha Night Charlotte, Volume 6, I was looking for a way to keep the timing (20 seconds per slide). I also need to see at least my current slide to know what I’m talking about. When I give talks or lecture in class, I always use the presenter view, so I can also see the next slide.
There are some iPhone timer apps for Pecha Kucha, but they’re very basic: they simply show you the number of the current slide and how much time you have left as a number. I wanted something a bit more visual than that.
So I decided to create a video from my presentation that would show me the current slide and an indication how much time I had left. I added 19 little boxes to each slide, each of which would disappear a second after the previous one. This is what that looks like on the title slide:
The boxes have a 2px white border so they are also visible on a dark background. Depending on the colors in your presentation, you might want to adapt that. But black and white work pretty much everywhere.
Exporting the video took a bit of experimentation. It seems that Keynote gets a little confused when there are automatic slide transitions and you want to create a video: it ends up adding the time for the export transition to the slide timing. So remove the slide timer and then export with a 1-second delay and 1 second for the transition (it won’t allow smaller values, and somehow that, together with the 19 timed boxes, ends up being exactly the right timing).
One issue is that exporting with the Full Quality setting creates a video that has a bit rate that is too high for the iPhone. So you can either use the CD-ROM Movie, Medium setting, which gives you only 400x300 pixels (which is workable, it’s just not very pretty). Or you can export using the higher-quality setting, which is 800x600, and then reduce the bit rate later. I used Stomp for this purpose, but there are lots of other choices. I reduced the bit rate to 125kbps and the frame rate to 10 (still way more than necessary).
This may sound tedious, but even with some experimenting, it didn’t take very long. And having my current slide and a usable timer in front of me was tremendously helpful during my presentation. The video was also useful to scrub through on the phone a few times right before the presentation, to remind me of the order and think through the things I wanted to say.
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