Question on order of actions for slide objects.

Question

Dear friends:
I am trying to set up some effects on my presentations but am struggling with one special effect that involves actions.
So far I have been able to do most of what I need but the last thing I need is to be able to make two or more actions occur at the same time. In the build drawer on the side of the inspector window I tried setting two different actions with the same build order number but can't seem to be able to make it work.
How can I assign the same build order number to two or more different actions so that they run at the same time ?
Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance,
Joseph Chamberlain

Answer 1

Joseph Chamberlain wrote:
First I can't seem to make both the move and scale actions run simultaneously.
Have you applied both actions to the images and have them run automatically with each other? To apply two actions to an object, apply the first action, then click the "Add Action" plus-sign button to add a second action to the same object. Then, in the Build Order drawer, you can specify that both actions occur with each other.
Second (unlike what happens with the Grid smart build) as the images are scaled to more than 100% they become pixilated (as if they were being stretched beyond their native resolution). The images I am using are all as large as the projector screen and are re-sized within Keynote but their native resolution remain large enough so that in being scaled they should still render very good quality images. What is the problem here ?
The problem is the brain-dead way that Keynote does its scaling in Actions. What it seems to do is apply the scaling to the object as it first appears on the slide. In other words, even if you have a high-resolution image, if you've scaled it down on the screen, when you apply the Scale action to it, the action will scale up the pixels of the image on the screen, and not use the resolution information in the original image. (Note that the Smart Builds don't seem to have this limitation.)
Now, the hard way around this is to start with the full-sized image on the slide, and use an invisible Scale action to scale it down to the starting size. That way, when you do the scale up, the resolution you're working with is the original image, and not the smaller size's resolution. To do this procedure, for each image put the full-sized version on the screen, a) give it a Scale action to reduce it to its desired starting size (setting the timing of this action to as short as possible), b) make the image transparent (in the Graphics Inspector), and c) use an Opacity action to make it visible, set to run after the Scale action is finished (and again, set the Opacity action duration to as short as possible). What the audience will see is a small version of the image appearing on the screen -- the scaling down will be invisible. Now, with the image set this way, you can add whatever scaling and movement you like, and the scaling up shouldn't suffer from the same pixelation.
As an alternative to shrinking down the image first, you can also try a simpler approach that I've used to good effect, which is to do the scaling as you have, but immediately after the scale action is finished, dissolve in a full-resolution image of the same size on top of the scaled version. The pixelation in the scaling action is most noticeable when the action finishes, so if you dissolve in a full-res version as soon as the action stops, the pixelation isn't an issue.
Last but not least I noticed that the scale action allows images to be scaled to no more than 200% the initial size unlike the Grid smart build that actually stretches images to fill the whole screen. I would like to accomplish this same effect but using actions instead of the Grid smart build. How can I do this ?
If you want this effect, you will have to "chain" multiple Scale actions together -- start with a small image and scale it up 200%, then have the image at that size immediately appear and scale up a further 200%, and so on. You can use the Metrics Inspector to set the starting sizes of the images exactly, so that you know what size the scaled up image will be.