Keynote 3.0: Problems exporting to iDVD

Keynote 3.0 offers an export option for iDVD 6.0 that allows you to burn your presentation as a DVD, which pauses after each slide is presented. Transitions and visual effects are preserved.

MacFixIt reader Kee Hinckley notes a problem with this functionality that causes soundtracks to not be properly synchronized.

Kee writes:

"If you make a presentation which has a background track which plays throughout the presentation (as opposed to per-slide), KeyNote exports it as two Quicktime movies. One contains the movie of the slides (chapter marked). The other contains the soundtrack (and it's named moviename_soundtrack.mov). The first movie references the other, so that they can play synchronously. However iDVD does not import the soundtrack. If you check the asset list, you'll see that it assumes the soundtrack is in the main movie. To make matters more confusing, playing the movie in iDVD works fine. That's because the DVD simulation uses Quicktime to do the playing, and it does the right thing. However, iDVD's failure to recognize the linked movie causes another bug which caused me no end of grief. When viewing a chapter listing page which contains thumbnails, the soundtrack plays! Furthermore, it plays once for each thumbnail. Of course they are slightly out of sync, and the result is incredibly weird. It even plays the soundtrack while it's encoding the chapter sections! Again, the problem is that QuickTime sees the reference, and although iDVD is presumably telling QuickTime not to play the audio track, it doesn't know that QuickTime is playing the linked audio track.

"I attempted to work around this problem by directly editing the iDVD project plist file and changing the audio soundtrack to point at the correct movie. That sort of worked, but then ran up against the way iDVD does presentations. After each slide is presented, the movie 'stops' on that page. You have to press play to go to the next page. Since it stops, the music stops also. So you end up with a soundtrack that is tied to the presentation, rather than one which plays independently. That makes me believe that a fix may be a while in coming, since it's probably going to require redesigning how iDVD creates presentations. However at the very least, iDVD needs to detect linked QuickTime files and handle them correctly."

Awkward workaround Kee offers a kludgy workaround, as follows:

"My daughter's solution to the problem? She'll use the DVD for the presentation, but hook her iPod up to the presentation speakers and play the soundtrack on that. I don't remember life being this complicated whenI was in junior high."

If you are having issues with Keynote 3.0, please drop us a line at late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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