Custom Compress Keynote using Handbrake | Reducing Keynotes Size

Apple’s Keynote is an easy and intuitive program to make good presentations. One advantage it has over Powerpoint is that it embeds the video segments into the file itself, no need to send video files and store in same directory. With Keynotes music and movies come with the file making life much easier when one goes to present on a different computer. However there is one problem with this embedding, that is keynotes can become quite large in size and when sharing via the web or email this size can be a problem. Apple’s keynote has an easy method for reducing file size which is simply to hit File | Reduce File Size. This works pretty okay but may not get the size of the presentation down to where you can store it online or send via email.

(Apple Easy Method to Reduce File Size)

Using the following method I was able to take a 40 megs Keynote presentation and reduce it to around 30 megs.  Not bad but still not a friendly size for email or posting on the web.  To reduce this keynote presentation further will need to do a couple of tricks.

1.  First need the program Handbrake,  this program comes with lots of presets to be able to convert movies using the h264 codec.     You can grab a copy of Handbrake here.

2.  With Handbrake installed we need to get access at the Raw movie files embedded in the keynote.  Keynote files end in the extension .key,  this is really a fake extension keynotes as the files are really just a zipped folder.  So to get access at the data all you need to do is rename you project.key  as project.zip.

Now you can simply expand the zip archive and you will see a folder name of your project with all the files inside.  Here is a screenshot of a keynote called Module #4 Content Copy, which I renamed to a zip file then now opened as a folder.

 

Inside you will notice that there are a series of MOV files,  these can be highly compressed using Handbrake and then copied back in the folder.

3.  Using Handbrake highly compress the MOV files and then copy them back into the folder.  Here click on Source and open a MOV file from your Keynote folder.  Now Toggle the presets and choose NORMAL.  Make sure the codec is H264 and that the file extension is mp4 or m4v.  Click Start and wait for it to finish.  Now the new compressed movie will be drastically smaller but will have the wrong extension, simply rename the extension from mkv , m4v, or mp4 to .mov.  Repeat this process for all movies.

4.  Lastly copy the new movie files back to the folder and choose replace (make sure Keynote and Handbrake are closed when you do this).  With the new smaller files in place rename the entire folder to a keynote by adding a .key at the end.  Thats it.

Using this process my Keynote went from 40 megs to 14.5 megs,  much better compression than the simple Reduce File Size.

Here is a screenshot comparing Keynotes auto Reduce File Size versus my method.