**Warning slightly technical nerdfest follows**
... but I have to tell someone...
Went to a Council of Synod meeting in Canberra last weekend (Standing Committee of the NSW body of the UCA) and my Presbytery (regional body) was 'on' to do the devotions. I took a CD with a few flash presentations and a couple of recent Keynote presentations. I also took my recently fixed laptop. Only problem is that said laptop is running Panther (OS X 10.3) and I now use Tiger (10.4) on my main machine along with Keynote 3 (which doesn't run on 10.3). I figured I would drop by the AppleCentre at ANU and buy a copy of Tiger and then install Keynote 3 and load the stuff from the CD.
First problem... as I drove into the parking lot of the AppleCentre I realised that I had forgotten my original media for Keynote 3. Bugger! Oh well, I'll buy that too and give or sell the extra copy to my church who I'm hoping will be buying a Mac in the next week or so.
Second problem. AppleCentre has a copy of Keynote 3 (well iWork '06 actually) but is out of stock of Tiger!!! An AppleCentre without even one copy of the current Apple OS - What the?! Oh well, my colleague Karyn is a Machead - hopefully she will (a) bring her laptop and (b) be running Tiger.
Third problem. Karyn does indeed have her laptop and she has indeed got Tiger running on it. But she has never bothered to update from Keynote 2 to Keynote 3. Oh well, surely Keynote files are backward compatible.
Fourth problem. Well, yes they are... if you save them in the old format... but who would need to do that, eh? I always keep my software up to date... Oh well, I'll just scrub using the Keynote 3 files and use some of the Flash stuff plus write some prayers and stuff.
But I really wanted to use that cool presentation with the Paul Kelly song (Surely God is a Lover) and nice piccy's. It would have impressed them. <sulk>
So anyway, here comes the good idea. I realise that I have an old copy of iMovie on my laptop (version 4). So first I used 'Show Package Contents' to crack open the Keynote file and extract the raw photos and the mp3 file. Then (between 11pm and 2am) I fired up iMovie; laid the mp3 down as the soundtrack; re-created the carefully timed Keynote slideshow transitions by listening to the song to gauge approximate times, then creating appropriate length video clips out of the still photos (adding interest with judicious use of the 'Ken Burns effect'); created titles over the top to recreate the lyrics which had been tastefully laid out as part of the Keynote Presentation; realised I didn't have a blank DVD and it was 2am; exported the movie to a Quicktime file; exported the movie to a Quicktime file again at full resolution to overcome some conversion artifacts; waited 15 minutes for the bloody thing to render into Quicktime (at 2.15am, 15 minutes seems to last about 3 hours); and, 'YAY', I'm home and hosed. The next morning everyone is duly impressed and I am a hero to my Presbytery colleagues.
For an encore, let me tell you about the time I used 2 bent paper clips and a perished rubber band to recreate the entire hash table for a 250Gb database whose index had been corrupted...