How to stop Keynote from trying to convert movies when opening old presentations

file conversionkeynote

For many years I took advantage of the Keynote feature of being able to embed Quartz Composer patches. I have come to accept that this feature no longer exists, and so most of my talks can no longer be given in their current form. However, some still contain slides without animations that I can use, so I would like to be able to open them.

However, when I try, Keynote informs me that the movies are incompatible and will be converted to another format. This process takes 30 minutes or more with my laptop's fans on full blast, but it ultimately doesn't work. (The movies just come out white.) If I click 'cancel', it closes the file.

How can I tell keynote that I don't want it to convert the movies? I'm fine if it just deletes them from the presentation, since I can no longer use them anyway – I just don't want to wait that long to open each file.

Best Answer

Gah, I figured out a decent answer myself just after posting a bounty.

Simply create a copy of the presentation. Then right-click on the copy, select "view package contents", and delete all the .mov files. Now the copy will open with just a warning that some files can't be found.

(If someone can come up with a way that actually preserves the QC patches, e.g. by converting them into movies in a way that actually works, I'll award them the bounty.)