Masking Video In Keynote With a Donut

It is easy to put an image in a shape and mask the image using Keynote. But you cannot do the same with video. However, you can place a shape or image on top of a video. So by using the right shape, like the donut shape, editing it, and positioning it just right, you can put video in a circular mask.


Video Transcript CLICK TO EXPAND
So let's say you're working in Keynote and you want to mask some video. Now you can do this pretty easily with images by using a shape. So I'm going to pick any shape. It could be all sorts of odd shapes here. Let's go and just stick with a basic circle and bring the circle in. Then I can drag and drop an image into the shape. Then I can move it around. Resize it. Do all sorts of things. But in the end I get a picture in a circle.

But I can't do that with video. If I bring a shape in here and I try to drag and drop a video into it and it won't go in there. So what can I do? Well, I can put a shape over a video. So let's go and put this video on the slide. Let's shrink it a little bit. You see when I add a shape I can actually put it over the video and it works when I play it. The actual video will play and the shape will be on top of it. But what if I wanted this to be in the circle. How I can do that? How can I reverse this?

Well, it turns out there's no easy way to do it. But there are ways. One way, of course, is to actually put lots of shapes around it. So I could actually, you know, surround it with rectangles and things and close it in. But it doesn't really help me much with a circle. I can go and create a mask in an image editing app like PhotoShop, for instance, that's transparent in the middle. Then bring that in as a shape and put that on top. That will work but it takes a lot of extra work. You have to have an image editing app and know how to make those shapes.

But it turns out that there's an easier way if you're just clever with the shapes. Because you can edit these shapes. So it would be nice if there was a shape of a hole rather than a circle. It turns out there is. It's a doughnut. You have this doughnut shape. I can bring that in here and if I enlarge it enough I can actually get the video inside this hole here in the middle. Now the problem with this is, of course, it's a doughnut with little sprinkles and a little bit of frosting here. I don't want all of that.

So what can I do to get rid of that. Well one thing I can do is to put other shapes on top of it. So I could, you know, say put a rectangle shape on top covering up some of these holes. Put another rectangle shape, etc. I can also edit the shape. I can Control click on it and I can make it editable. Then I get everything here where I can edit it. I can actually drag little rectangles over each sprinkle and get rid of them. I can do that with all the sprinkles here and just making sure I don't get rid of the edges or the hole in the middle that I'm going to use. I can do that same thing here with the frosting as long as I don't go too close to the edge to get rid of the things that are there. There we go!

So now I've created a new shape there. I can save it to my shapes if I want so I can use it next time. I can expand it. Bring it in there. Let's go and change its color to make it white. Now when I play this slide there's my video inside of a circle. I can make adjustments and fine tune to get it the way that I want.

Even if I didn't want to say, you know, have this outer circle here, notice how the video may leak out of here depending upon the shape of this, you can go in and edit the shape and do things like stretch the corners of these. So I can bring each one out. I can stretch these edges as well. I can elongate it. So I can do all sorts of things to distort it and play around with it until I get a shape that I want that has a hole like I want to be able to play video through.

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