Ken Burns Movies

I need to produce 'movies' that consist of a series dissolves of still photos. I want to use a Ken Burns approach whereby I zoom and pan and am wondering if FCP is the right software. If anyone out there is doing similar stuff, I'd sure appreciate your input. Thanks.

You are in luck! A new free 'Ken Burns style' plugin from Noise Industries will help

[www.noiseindustries.com]

Peter

www.peterwiggins.com
www.idustrialrevolution.com

just so you know the great photo moves in films by Ken Burns and others are on the whole NOT done in software.

they mock them up in their editing app,
then have them re-done with a rostrum camera, or motion control camera.

FCP is pretty BAD at doing these moves well if you are just suing the motion tab & wireframe.
the problem is that there are different scales used for SCALE, and for POSITION,
so doing a zoom & pan, and trying to ease in /out (smooth starts and stops to your move rather than clunky ones) is diabolically hard

that's why people make 3rd party plugins like the one Peter mentioned.

Lyric make one, too.

i don't know how they'd compare.

my way of getting around the problem has been to AVOID the issue of stoping or starting the move:
the photos move all the time, and i dissolve between them,
and maybe start and end with static pics that i also dissolve from/to


but there is also MOTION, which has a *Virtual* camera.
you could look into plotting out your photos in FCP,
then send to motion, and use the camera there.

i haven't done this, so cant comment on how easy it would be.



cheers,
nick

Motion moves seem a lot smoother to me than FCP still moves. Could be that Motion may have sub pixel rendering and FCP doesn't? Not sure but all moves in Motion are a heck of a lot easier, simpler and turn out better.

However you decide to do your moves, I would suggest using Motion over FCP.

Dan

I bought the Lyric plugin a while ago and found it less than intuitive. In fact, my project got stalled so badly i reverted to true industry standard by composing the whole scene in iMovie instead

Final Cut isn't great at this. Actually, most people these days don't use motion stand cameras either - they use Adobe After Effects, which is fabulous but time consuming. My understanding is that Motion works in a similar way and probably has similar results, if you know how to use it.

One thing I frequently use as PBS doc editor is a 3rd party plug-in called "Moving Picture" from www.stagetools.com - I have used it extensively for Avid but never with Final Cut, though I know he does make a Final Cut Pro version. It isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than the native Final Cut parameters.

good luck!

The cool thing about doing this in After Effects is you lay out your photos in Z-depth and fly a camera around with a light parented to it. Really not time consuming at all if you know your way around AE.

It's more time consuming in Motion if you ask me

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Sorry - I should have been more clear: After Effects is time consuming for me because I don't really know how to use it.

What does mock them up mean?

Ahh After Effects!!

Mock Up: A model, often full-size, for study, testing, or teaching. It's a Design term used to represent initial designs. You "mock up" an initial layout using low-res stills, needle drop music, etc and once that is approved, build it in full res with licensed tracks, etc.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

You might give a look-see at
www.stagetools.com
I use it quite often to get "Ken Burns" effects and find it works extremely well and is quite easy to use. After you have set up all your zooms and pans, you can output to QT format to use in FCP. A lot easier and better results than trying to do in FCP.

Regards, Cyrus
iMac 27" Intel i7 Quad-Core; 16GB RAM; 2TB HD
Final Cut Studio, FCP X, Photoshop CS5, After Effects, etc.