Create Awesome YouTube End Screens With Keynote

You don't need to use complex graphics or video motion tools to create backgrounds for YouTube end screens. Instead, you can simply use Keynote and build a single-slide presentation with animation. It is fairly easy to get elements lined up with placeholders and then to play around with various animations to make your end screen look great. Then you can export as a movie and add it to the end of your YouTube videos as you finish editing them.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to build a YouTube end screen using only Keynote.
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So adding YouTube End Screen is pretty easy. But you have to have something that goes behind it so your last 15-20 seconds of your video needs to be either a blank screen or something with your logo. People use all sorts of tools to create these. You can create them in PhotoShop if you just want them to be static. Or you can use a tool like Final Cut or Adobe Aftereffects or Motion to create something that has got some movement. But those tools are expensive and difficult to learn. You can create a great end screen using only Keynote on your Mac and it's actually very easy and there are a lot of cool things you can do.
Let's start off by taking a look at the End Screen interface here in YouTube because you need to get the sizes of the different elements. I've added all the elements here. So I have two videos here. I have the Subscribe button and I have the Link rectangle. So I've added them all and you can also see the blue outline here for the area where you can put these. You can't move these outside of this area. The idea is I want to get the sizes for these. Now these rectangles can actually be enlarged a little bit as well. So keep that in mind.
What I did is I took a screenshot of this and used that to measure the sizes for all these elements. So here are my results based on a screen size of 1920 x 1080. The subscribe circle should be 294 x 294 and so should the little square button for linking to your website. Video rectangles can be a small 615 wide and as large as 862 wide. So you can see the dimensions there. The subscribe circle and the link square, they can expand when you move the cursor over them to this large rectangle that shows more information and that's the size for that rectangle. So that's something to keep in mind when designing.
Now the Boundary for this entire thing is 1840 x 780 approximately. It's centered left to right. But it's not centered top to bottom because there's the control strip of the buttons and things at the bottom of YouTube videos. So it's about 140 pixels from the top. So let's go and create a Keynote presentation. I want it to be widescreen to fit video dimensions. I'm going to choose a simple black background. I'm going to zoom to fit the slide so I see the entire thing. Get rid of the defaults here.
The first thing I want to do is I want to lay in a shape here that shows me the area that I could have the different end screen elements. So I'm going to create a rectangle shape. The boundary for this is 1840 x 780 rectangle and it's going to be centered but it's also going to be 140 pixels from the top. I'm going to go to Style and I'm going to give it a border, purple there. I get rid of the fill and this is the are where the elements can fit in. Now let's add some placeholder elements. I'll do a rectangle here and I'll make that the size of one of the video elements. So 615 x 345. I'm going to put that one here at the bottom left all the way at the corner. I'm going to Option drag and put another one there.
Now a Subscription button is going to actually look circular so I'm going to use a circle there. I'm going to make that approximately 296. It doesn't have to be perfect. These are placeholders. So I'm going to stick this here on the left and I'm also going to add some other elements. So I'll drag and drop my logo in here. I'll put that at the upper right hand corner. Of course you're going to design your own. You can design anything. That's the whole point of this. It's so easy to design. So I'll stick this here. Let me move this up. I'm going to then put other elements in. So let's put a piece of text and say Subscribe. I'll make it a little bit bigger. This is going to point to this button here. I'm going to Option drag to create more text down here. I'll put Watch More. I'm going to something fancy with this. I'm going to left justify the first line and right justify the second line. Expand it just a little bit. Now I'm going to add some arrows. Good luck doing this in PhotoShop or one of the other tools. It's difficult to do. Experts, I'm sure, know how to do it but if you've never done it before it's difficult to do. Not just arrows. Arrows are easy. But arrows with dots like that. That's what I want. So I'm going to have this thing. It's going to like point to here to visually draw the eye to it. I'm going to Option drag and stick one here and Option dray and stick one here and do Arrange horizontally.
Now this is how it's going to look when it's done but I want to add animation here and that's the power of this whole thing. You can so easily animate things in Keynote. Every item here, except the placeholders, are going to be animated. The first thing we want animated is the logo. We want that to appear. So we're going to select it. We're going to go to Animate. We're going to Add an Effect. We're going to have it Fade and Scale. Then it's going to slowly come in and do this little shine thing. Let's speed that up over one second. So the logo appears first. What appears next?
The Subscribe button. So we'll add an effect here. We're going to have that just appear. Just come in like that. So it's going to Appear and then the next thing will be this arrow here. This is actually going to do a Line Draw. So a Line Draw is going to draw like that. We want to speed that up. Let's do it at.5. Okay. Then this one is also going to Appear and then this is going to do a Line Draw at.5 as well and this is going to do a Line Draw also that fast. We're going to go and bring up the Build Order here.
So the Build Order is going to say okay the first thing that's going to happen is this is going to come into place. We want that to happen first. Then we want the Subscribe button to appear. Then we want the line to draw. This to appear. These two appear at the same time. So we're going to drag them onto each other. We're going to make it so that the second one happens with Build five. Now we've got a bunch of stuff happening at the same time. Select all of these. Hit Preview. We'll see that appear. That, that, and that. So that's pretty good. We can actually maybe even make things better by changing this to instead of Appear we can have it Dissolve. We'll change this one to Dissolve.
Let's add a nice background here. I can do a Shape, cover the entire area and then we'll send it to the back. What I'm going to do with this is I'm going to change it so that the Style is a Gradient fill. I'm going to change the colors so it goes from like gray to black and even change the angle lighter at the bottom left corner like that. Now you can do a simple gradient fill. You can also do images. So I can drag and drop an image in here. Move this graphic over the entire area. I'll scale it to fit and I can then arrange and send it back and have it instead of that gradient background. I can do something like change the opacity of it or I can go Image and change things actually make it low contrast. Kind of this faded nice background. I think I'll stick with the gradient for this.
One thing we need to do is to just click on the background there for the slide. We only have one slide in this entire thing. I'm going to go to Animate and the transition for the end of this, to go to the end of the presentation, we want to set that to Automatic and then 10 seconds. So after all this animation, the half second here and the half second there, all of that, then it's going to delay 10 seconds before it actually finishes the entire presentation because we've got 15 to 20 seconds that we want to have where this thing is running so it can be a good end screen.
Now if we want to preview this properly we want to take away the need to click things. So we're going to go to Build Order again. I'm going to select this here and I'm going to say After transition this one is going to be after Build 1, this is going to be after Build 2, this is going to be after Build 3, and this one after Build 4. You can see this one here is already set to With Build 5. So now the entire thing should work if I just play it. See that appears. There's that and there's that. Good, that's what I want.
So the things that we don't need are the border and the placeholders. Now that we have those gone we can go and Export To a Movie, 1080, and Save it. Here's the final product. Just play that. You can see it all happens there. Now I can easily add sound to it in Keynote and it would export with sound but I'd rather do that in the editing tool I'm using. So Final Cut or Premier or iMovie or whatever it is. I can just add that as an audio layer.
So the advantages to using Keynote for this is it's easy to add these elements. It's easy to animate them. It's easy to export and it's easy to go back and make modifications and changes and improve it over time. You don't have to learn a whole new tool for doing it. You don't have to learn how to animate lines and do all sorts of other things. You have all these other transitions and animations at your disposal as well. So you can play around with all sorts of interesting ways to have your logo pop in and elements fly in and do all sorts of things.
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