Suggestions for Showcasing KN functionality vs. PPT

Question

Most of my and my company's presentation work is done in PowerPoint (it's largely client-dictated), but I'd like to throw Keynote into the mix whenever possible as another option.
And I'd like to showcase Keynote's advantages over PowerPoint in terms of audience reception. In other words, I'm not really interested in showcasing how much easier something is to create or design, but rather what advantages an end audience might get and see with a KN presentation as opposed to a PPT presentation.
Here's what I have so far...
• Text over Video
• Better Video
• Unique Animations/Transitions
• True soft shadowing of text
Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

Animated slide backgrounds using Quartz compositions. You can create some very cool effects using Quartz compositions, and produce slides that are rather cinematic in their effect. My preference is to use backgrounds where the animation is rather subtle (usually slow changes of colour across the slide), which really makes the presentation seem alive. You can also use these to do much more extreme effects (e.g., since there are quite a few screensavers that use Quartz compositions for their effects, you can easily borrow the composition file and drop a more funky effect into your slideshow).
If you have access to an illustration application, you can also do very cool effects creating native Keynote objects using svg2key. The advantage of using native Keynote objects is that they can be filled, stroked, and shadowed extremely easily, as well as used to mask images. One nice trick is to use svg2key to create letters as Keynote objects, and then fill them with an image. (I've also used this capability to create an image "jigsaw puzzle" -- the pieces were Keynote objects that were used as image masks, and with builds I was able to plop separate pieces onto the slide until the entire image appeared, which was a nice effect.) Creating images with non-rectangular shapes isn't unique to Keynote, but it is very easy to do relative to how it would be done in PowerPoint (and thus you'd be inclined to use it more).