ken burns...more of that

I'm doing some projects next week that will be heavy on stills. I've already watched and used the KenBurns FCP>Motion and back again tutorial to great success (though it seems to make FCP kinda glitchy - several crashes and some shaking of my fist at the sky, why me lord?!?) I was wondering if any of you have other suggestions/links to tutorials about cool things to do with stills in FCP?

Thanks in advance,
Andre

Maybe this will help?

The company i work for did this for the NY Times Magazine Online. It's all photos with a vo. We did it in FCP. Very simple moves and dissolves.

[video.nytimes.com]

Perhaps the NY Times magazine Online will have other similar examples.
___

I worked on a documentary for PBS (American Experience) a while ago. Me and the other assistant editor, did all the photo moves in After Effects. I'm not saying you should go that route...the idea being: the Editor mocked-up all his moves on a paper print-out of the photo. He used a pencil to crop the photo and determine the move. The assistant and I would then copy the ideas of his moves in AE.

I think it's a good idea to know how you want to move the photo before you do it. It will make your work flow much easier especially if you crash a lot by hitting "un-do".

Also, try and have fun with your project!

Good luck!

Decca

Yeah...probably not going to achieve anything "cool" with photos in FCP. AE is the way to go (some folks here use Motion as well).

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I have Motion but not AE. I'll knock around in there.

Decca, thanks for the link. I love when the Lagonda's "eyes" open. Good stuff.

Thanks

I recently had to do several animations for the CTIA convention going on this week. They were pretty much "fancy slide shows". I used some basic expressions in after effects like scale over time, and toss, and fade in/fade out. It wasn't as precise as key-framing each shot, but it saved tons of time.

Here's a good place to start with expressions... [mograph.net]

I suggest you to try this free filter to automate Ken Burn effects in FCP or FCE: Auto Pan Zoom.
Its main advantage is that you can apply it to a large number of images in the timeline in just one shot, and automatically get different pans and zooms in each image.
Of course, you can also control motion in each single image, but the default values should be ok in most cases.

Piero

I would use Motion over using FCP. It's better to keep your photos moving. If you stop it in the middle and then start it up again, that's where you get into trouble.

I never used the free filter to automate Ken Burn effects, but I think it's worth a try. But since you have Motion, I'd use that. There's a nice tutorial on lynda.com by Larry Jordan called; Moving on Stills.