Supposed to be Cuppa Joe Video, but the mug didn’t quite come out as I expected. Enjoy!

Yes, I visit http://www.homestarrunner.com.... a lot. BUT it gives me the creative muse (combined with my funny deficient funnybone) to put together items like this. I was curious about whether or not a Keynote presentation WITH audio could exist on the web in it’s native format, ie, NOT using QuickTime Pro to weld the two together.

When you use Keynote to create a QuickTime movie that has audio set as the background track, the only way for QuickTime to handle this is to put the audio in a place that doesn’t depend on the timing of the first movie (because you don’t want the audio to pause when your presentation does). Turns out that this “safe” place is in a separate “soundtrack” movie. While this means that everything works great locally, moving this to email, the web, DVD, just about ANYwhere else causes consternation. This is because, since your audio is in this separate movie and QuickTime is assuming it’s in the same folder as the video portion, not ONLY do you have to get both parts to the viewer, you also have to make sure they leave them in the same directory which is why many just set the transitions to Automatic so that the presentation won’t stop, then save the audio as a part of the movie... which means they have to work around the fact that Keynote presentations don’t synch EXACTLY the way you want them to.

Anyhow, long story just a little longer, I wanted to know if you were careful, could you get iWeb to take the audio of your Keynote presentation. This will be the first time I’ve gone into my iDisk to manually alter something for these pages, but science demands it!

I’ll update this page once I’ve determined if it works or not, so if you see some strange tomfoolery going on whilst you reload, that’s just me publishing and publishing until I find out.

UPDATE: Seems it only took one try, and works just as it did locally. The hard part is finding where the audio part got deposited and toss this one in with it. Here’s what you do if you use .Mac. First, Publish the site with the “video only” movie. Next, open your iDisk (From the Finder, click “Go”, select iDisk and click “My Disk”. This opens the iDisk.) Now, open the Web folder, then the Sites folder then the iWeb folder. In here are the names of your sites (mine is tipsfromtheiceberg). Once inside that folder, I opened my Blog folder and looked for the most recent folder. In my case it was the E275A42E-C27.....ahhh you know, the long URL number up there with _files tacked on the end.

I opened that folder, found my original movie sitting there waiting, tossed in it’s mate then reloaded the page in Safari. Click the play button for the funny.

I’ll find out after my next entry if that .mov file will get lost, but if it doesn’t that would mean that when you Publish, iWeb doesn’t remove _files it doesn’t know about.