Ever wanted to know what was behind that picture of the longboard surfer? Well, now you know thanks to iWeb and Keynote (and Google, and the photographers... well in a holistic sense, thanks to you, too!)

This was a fairly simple manipulation of the exported QuickTime file that anyone can do since the QuickTime Player does NOT require Pro in order to copy out a single frame. Isn’t that nice?

Keynote QuickTime Qombo

1 iWork (separate the Keynote from the Pages)

1 QuickTime Player (raw, unregistered)

2 Images (iPhoto preferred, but not required)

1 Preview

Keynote makes picking an image from your iPhoto library a breeze! (If you go into iPhoto first to create an album with the pictures you’d like to try, that will make it even easier for you, especially if you have MANY photos) Just bring up the Media display and pick two images to play with. Drag and drop them onto the slide and adjust the size so that the image displays as you want it to. You can even mix and match horizontal and vertical images as long as both images fill the slides completely.

Now, select the first slide and select a transition you want to apply to it (the one above is Page Flip). You’ll find that some work better than others, for example, with the Flip or Shutter transitions, you don’t see both images at once. After picking the transition, click the image above the Effect choice to play it repeatedly to get a good idea of what it’s going to look like. Now, you have an opportunity to rearrange your images so that the transition will show them as you want. For the Page Flip, I only wanted sand to show through that lower right corner, so I moved that image over to the left. This way, the transition shows the sand of an arid, parched, forbidding landscape and not the lemonade stand. Now save your document.

Wait for the video to export then open it in QuickTime. You can stop the automatic playback by hitting the space bar then use the right and left arrow keys to go through the video frame by frame. When you find that golden frame, command-C will copy it to the clipboard. BUT, you don’t want to paste this directly into iWeb because it may confuse it for a movie. Instead, take a trip through Preview (it is SO very useful). Open Preview, command-N will create a new document with what you just copied, command-C will copy Preview’s image to the clipboard and when you paste it into iWeb, it won’t have a QuickTime controller.

That’s the basics and you’re done at that point, if you want a little something EXTRA, read on.

And the Depth to Millions+

Click OK, then Next... and choose where you want to save it. Open the file in QuickTime, do the Preview-Passthru I described above and you can have images that look like the ones to the left and right. Slick!