A great tip for Mac users from one of our super power users here at Adobe, Jason Parker…
Nowadays presentations are becoming more complex with dynamic movie backgrounds, embedded videos,
and flashy builds. Unfortunately presentations created in Keynote (Apple’s equivlant to PowerPoint) are not
upload compatible with Acrobat Connect Pro yet. Keynote does offer an export to PPT option, however often times
text is reformatted, slide builds and transitions are lost or inconsistent, and there is no option to embed
videos.
At a recent event we supported all of the presentations were in Keynote and included embedded videos.
The challenge we faced was maintaining the original look and feel of the uploaded the
presentation and playing the embedded videos.
Following our best practices, we created our Connect Pro room layouts to reflect the meeting agenda along with
an additional layout for the videos. We layered/stacked the Share pods in the order in which they were to
be played in on the “videos” layout. During the event we switched between the presenters layout to the
videos layout in sync with the live presentation mimicking the Keynote version.
Here’s a quick summary of the conversion process we used to convert the Keynote presentations (and
videos) to an upload compatible (PPT) Acrobat Connect Pro format.
Please note: PowerPoint for Mac does not have the same import features as the Windows PowerPoint
application. For this process we used a MacBook Pro with Keynote ’08 and Office 2007 (installed on
VMware running Windows XP).
1. From Keynote select File -> Export and select the Image option. Select ‘PNG (high quality)’ and
check the ‘Create an image for each stage of builds’ option (Mac side).
2. Create a New Folder to copy the files into and select Export.
3. The .MOV files will be saved to a sub-folder in your newly created export folder. Alternatively
you can select ‘Show Package Contents’ from the Keynote file cut out the .MOV files.
4. Copy newly created folder and files to a PC for importing.
5. From PowerPoint select ‘Insert Photo Album’ choose ‘Insert picture from File/Disk – browse to
the folder you exported the PNGs to and select Ctrl+A then to insert/import the PNG files
then click Create.
6. Review the newly created slides removing extra transitions/slide duplicates.
7. To reduce the file size click on a picture/image in the presentation then select ‘Picture Tools’ from
the menu options then click on ‘Compress Pictures’. Under options select 96ppi and delete
cropped areas.
8. After compressing – save and close, then upload the PPT to the Connect content folder or Connect
meeting room.
Using a video conversion application such as Flash Video Encoder convert the video(s) from .MOV to
.FLV. Upload the files to the Acrobat Connect content folder or Connect meeting room.