Creating 3D Chart Animations In Keynote

You can animate charts in Keynote, with 2D and 3D charts having different types of animations. With 3D charts, you can rotate the chart, watch it grow, and even have it come in from in front of the screen. You can choose whether to have the entire chart come in at once, or build piece by piece. Once you are done, you can use the animation to punch up your presentation, or export to a video file to use in iMovie or Final Cut.


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You can create 3D animated charts on your Mac using Keynote. Now you may think of charts being more of a thing in Numbers but Keynote is where all the presentations stuff goes on. So an animated effect is going to be more natural in Keynote. So this is where you do it.

I'm in Keynote here. I have a new document and I click on Chart and I can insert a chart. Now I talked before on how to animate 2D charts but let's look at 3D charts. We'll select a basic chart here and we'll just go with the default data. If you want to edit the chart data you click on that big button there and you can edit it. Now how can you animate this? Well, first let's get it in a position like we want. So I'll move it here on the screen around. If I grab the circle in here I can drag it in 3D space. I can still grab the ends here and move it around.

So once we've got that all squared away, this is how we want it to finish, then we'll go to Animate and we can Build In or Build Out. Let's do just Build In effect. They're the same it's just that they're the opposite. So let's Add an Effect. In addition to basic appearance animations we've got these 3D chart effect. They only appear when you are selecting a 3D chart. So you won't see them normally. So we'll select Crane or we can hit simply Preview to see a preview of it. That's what it looks like. That's the Crane effect, that's the Grow effect, Rotate and you can combine Rotate and Grow, and you can do Y Axis which has it coming into the screen. I like that one.

Now when you select one you have options. You can change the duration so you can slow it down. I can hit Preview to check it out. I can change the rotation angles. So this will get me to my starting rotation angle. So I'll put it negative 180 and I Preview and you can see now how much more it spins around. Positive 180 it's going to come the other way. I can also do Delivery. Whether it's all at once or Cascade. So let's try it with Cascade and you can see how they each appear one by one as the rotation is going on.

So let's change to another effect. Let's say instead of Crane let's go to Grow. Then you can see I can add the Delivery and now I can actually do a bunch of different things in the Delivery, more so than before. I've got the background to appear first for instance and then the chart. So you can do Elements in Series, Elements in Set, or just all at once. You can change the duration as well. Let's go and take a look at Rotate there. Let's do it as a Z Axis one. So each one has just a little bit different options here.

Now, not only that, you've got different options depending upon the type of chart. So let's delete this chart and let's go to a pie chart. A pie chart here you can similarly arrange how you want it to be. Put it where you want. Then we can Add an Effect. You've got the same ones here like Crane, and Grow, Rotate, Rotate and Grow, and Z Axis like that. But you also have Radial. Radial is only for the pie chart. That's how the Radial one works. So we can select that one and we can change Delivery to Cascade here. By Wedge so each one individually. Then you can try some of the other ones as well. So 3D Grow works really well with a pie chart like that. So you can adjust these. Adjust the Duration and do it for different types of charts. You get a similar set here as you do for the bar charts. Crane, Grow, Rotate, Rotate and Grow, and Z Axis.

Now you can also export the animation and use it in a video. So to do that I'm going to go to the Document here and I'm going to change the size to wide screen so it works better in a video. Then I'm going to Export To, I'm just going to choose Movie. Just use the default settings here. Actually I'll go to 1080 for a nicer looking video. I'll Export and it'll export as a video file that I can then bring into iMovie or Final Cut or Premier or anything. So I'll Hide that there and here is my video. You can see it's eight seconds long so I could probably trim a little bit off the front and back here but I do get my animation in there.

What would be even better is if I could have it be transparent and then I could use it in a video more effectively. So what I want to do is click on the background and then go to Format and then with the background selected there I can see the background colors so I want to change it to No Fill. Then when I export I want to export as movie, select 1080, but then go and select Custom. Actually then you have to fill this in anyway even though you selected 1080 before, so select Custom size here and select Apple ProRes 4444 and that will allow you to export a transparent version. That's really handy. You can see it's transparent here if I click on it and I Preview you can see the transparent background. Then I could go to say iMovie here and in iMovie I've just got a background image and I can bring this video into iMovie and I put it on top here. You can see how it's transparent. So it's over the video behind it. So that's kind of nice too. Lots you can do here using these 3D animated charts.

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