MacOS Keynote and iMovie buggy and out-dated?

[zqbobs]

My setup: MBA M3, Sonoma 14.7.2, Keynote 14.4 (2025), iMovie 10.4.3 (2024)

My goal is to create pages for a photo book AND use the same content as a movie with music background. I’m creating a series of “slides” in Keynote (eventually for pages in the book), exporting them as a movie, and importing that into iMovie to add music. I’m reasonably familiar with Keynote, but seeing some strange behavior, such as when switching the slide aspect ratio between 4:3 and 16:9, the content will not restore to it’s original size, but continues to get smaller and smaller relative to the slide size, even if I go back and forth between those two settings. Wouldn’t you expect it to return to the previous setting for content vs slide size?

I am not very familiar with iMovie, but it’s UI seems clunky and out-dated to me. Also, a lot of little annoyances, like when multiple music tracks are loaded to play at different times in the movie, iMovie does not display the filenames of the tracks in the Media window, so I have to remember which is which, or play some notes. Another oddity is that to load a different movie file (e.g. I change my Keynote content), I can’t seem to preserve the music timeline. I have to delete the first movie WITH music from iMovie and start over.

Finally, I want to export the combined video+music to a movie file I can play with QT, VLC, etc. The only way I see to do that is the menu File>Share>File...

Any comments or tips on these problems - am I just not understanding these apps well enough? Any recommendations for another app/apps to achieve the same goal?

 

[Slartibart]

maybe a few points to clarify:

• you use Keynote to combine text, images and photos and export this than as a ”still” into iMovie?
• Or are you using Keynote to animate parts of the slides and export the result then as movie?
• Are you using templates in Keynote?
• what is the intended final output format/device from iMovie?

if you just need ”stills” - why not use the free Affinity Studio , Apple Pages with the free Presto Templates, or e.g. Bookwright from Blurb (or any other software from the photobomb print service of your choice)? Layout and design options are probably much better than using Keynote and, depending of the final output for the movies you create, you might be able to just use screenshots or you export high resolution still images of the pages (e.g., as PDF which you convert to PNG, TIFF, JPEG; programs by printing services like Bookwright will probably only serve for screenshot „exports“, but that might completely sufficient for the presentation device of your movies).

Creating and using templates/your own theme in Keynote will partly address the scaling issue when switching between 4:3 and 16:9.

iMovie has it limits and quirks - IMHO it is perfectly fine when you FIRST have created all FINAL versions of the parts you want to combine in a movie. The problem you describe affecting the audio/music time line is caused by adding video/movie files which include an audio track (maybe just empty, but it is there) - you can use Quicktime to remove it or use a Applescript, Automator or Shortcut script for that.

A free, more advanced video editing solution is DaVinci Resolve … or the free Blender.

I assume here, based on your use of Keynote and iMovie, you are interested in „free“ programs… there are of course multiple other commercially available options. 🤓

 

[zqbobs]

maybe a few points to clarify:

• you use Keynote to combine text, images and photos and export this than as a ”still” into iMovie?
• Or are you using Keynote to animate parts of the slides and export the result then as movie?
• Are you using templates in Keynote?
• what is the intended final output format/device from iMovie?

if you just need ”stills” - why not use the free Affinity Studio , Apple Pages with the free Presto Templates, or e.g. Bookwright from Blurb (or any other software from the photobomb print service of your choice)? Layout and design options are probably much better than using Keynote and, depending of the final output for the movies you create, you might be able to just use screenshots or you export high resolution still images of the pages (e.g., as PDF which you convert to PNG, TIFF, JPEG; programs by printing services like Bookwright will probably only serve for screenshot „exports“, but that might completely sufficient for the presentation device of your movies).

Creating and using templates/your own theme in Keynote will partly address the scaling issue when switching between 4:3 and 16:9.

iMovie has it limits and quirks - IMHO it is perfectly fine when you FIRST have created all FINAL versions of the parts you want to combine in a movie. The problem you describe affecting the audio/music time line is caused by adding video/movie files which include an audio track (maybe just empty, but it is there) - you can use Quicktime to remove it or use a Applescript, Automator or Shortcut script for that.

A free, more advanced video editing solution is DaVinci Resolve … or the free Blender.

I assume here, based on your use of Keynote and iMovie, you are interested in „free“ programs… there are of course multiple other commercially available options. 🤓

Thanks for your detailed comments. To your 4 bullets, I’ll try to clarify:

I’m creating a set of slides in Keynote, no template, each with a few photos, captions, etc. Each slide is output as a high resolution JPEG. These JPEGs are the pages (one JPEG/page) in the book to be made, and I have in fact done that on other projects using MixBook to publish. So, I’m doing all the page layout and formatting in Keynote.

Now, I’m adding conversion to a movie. I export the whole Keynote file to a movie (Apple MPEG-4) from Keynote. I then import that to iMovie along with some MP3 audio clips and merge them into one timeline. Cut, move, fade, etc the MP3 components to get what I want, soundwise, and then export that to a generic MPEG-4 movie with sound. The final output device for the movie is just a TV (for which, the 16:9 aspect seems best although it seems to shrink my page content and result in a lot of background space on right and left sides. On the other hand, 4:3 aspect cuts off the video at top and bottom - not sure why).

It does seem to be working OK, but has the little UI annoyances mentioned along the way. And, as you correctly note, if I want or need to make any change in the initial movie, I need to go back to Keynote, make the changes and repeat the whole export/import/combine with audio/export process again - arrrgh! Maybe your tip about deleting any audio track will help there.

Some of your tips could smooth the process, so I’ll look at them. I have been using Keynote for layout and formatting for a book project, because it always seemed easier and more flexible than the online book UIs (MixBook,Blurb). I do like Bookwright, but believe the output has to be printed by Blurb, and I've had issues with their quality at that stage.

Again, thanks for the comments. I remain open to any other suggestions or tips...