Non-linear moves in Ken Burns effects

Pans and zooms tend to ramp up in speed. This doesn't happen all the time, but enough that it is a problem. Anyone else dealing with this?

this is not a bug, but a feature of iMHD... ;-))
to be serious, iM Grandmaster Karl Petersen had mention this often in this forum and gave some alert to Apple... because, in many cases, a non-linear movement look much better, in some absolutely not...- so, there should be some check-box.-
only workaround so far: make the movement and the time a little longer; cut off the unwanted exaleration..- :-/

Similar Messages

I need to do non-constrained crops for Ken Burns effect in photo slide show

I am making photo slide shows in imovie '09. I understand the Ken Burns effect and how to set a start and an end point. I want to use the effect on vertical or portrait mode photos. i would like to have the entire photo displayed in portrait mode and have it zoom in a bit. The problem is The start and end points seem to only be horizontal or landscape mode. I can't ever get the entire image selected. How can I do this?
Thanks,
Tim

You need to add the letterbox (black space) in another application. iMovie's Ken Burns effect will not do it for you. You can do it in Photoshop if you like.
However, there is a way to do it in Automator, and you can do hundreds of vertical photos very quickly. That is the way I do it.
Here is more detail:
There is also a quick way to pad your images without using Photoshop. This method will pad hundreds of images in just a few seconds.
You do it with a tool that comes with OS/X called Automator. It should be in your Applications/Utilities folder.
Automator is basically a workflow tool. It allows you to string together commands and actions into a workflow and then execute the entire sequence at once. If you have Snow Leopard, you can even add these workflows to your contextual menus that come up when you right-click.
There are many workflows that would work to pad your images. Here is an example:
In Automator, start a photo workflow and drag the following actions into the workflow from the Action palettes on the left.
You should have something like:
1)Ask for Photos (You must select one or more photos and hit Select - you can make this easier by putting them in an album beforehand)
2) Copy Finder Items (give it a folder to copy to- so you can find them easily)
3) Pad Images. (put a check mark in "scale image before padding" Pick the pixel dimensions of your project...like 640x480 or 960x540. or 1920x1080
Hit Run and a dialog box will come up asking you to select photos. When you are finished, press SELECT and the Automator script will keep running.
Then at the end you should have padded images in the folder you created in step 2.

Mixing photos with Ken Burns effect with 'still' photos

I am just beginning to experiment with iMovie '09. My medium is still photographs and my goal was to create a movie with these photographs, and send them to iDVD to test the quality of the final images.
I have 3 questions.
1. I started by using about 10 photos from iPhoto, then adding music and transitions. I used the same 10 slides, same music and transitions to make a second movie, but this time I used the Ken Burns effect on two of the photos. When I moved the movies to iDVD, the first one was fine, but in the second one, the 'jaggies' appeared in the iDVD version. Is it an 'all or none' proposition regarding the Ken Burns effect if I want to avoid images with jagged edges or is there a way to combine moving and still images?
2. The first time I tried to send the movie to iDVD I chose Share>iDVD. A drop down window appeared and it looked as if a movie had been created but when I opened the media/movies pane in iDVD, a message appeared saying "the project can't be used because it has not been prepared for sharing yet." What was actually happening when I chose Share>iDVD?
3. I have been reading other posts about sharing from iMovie to iDVD. Am I understanding correctly that I the largest size I can go to is 'medium'? In my experiments, I have been choosing 'large' and they look OK. (I chose 'large' because that was what was modelled in the tutorial.) Would I have trouble when it comes to burning them?

Is it an 'all or none' proposition regarding the Ken Burns effect if I want to avoid images with jagged >edges or is there a way to combine moving and still images?
You should be able to combine.
Open iMovie Preferences and put a check mark next to "Display Time as HH:MM:SS:Frames". This lets you edit more accurately and if there is an extraneous Ken Burns Frame you can see it.
he first time I tried to send the movie to iDVD I chose Share>iDVD. A drop down window appeared >and it looked as if a movie had been created but when I opened the media/movies pane in iDVD, a >message appeared saying "the project can't be used because it has not been prepared for sharing >yet." What was actually happening when I chose Share>iDVD?
Try saving your movie to either iTunes or the Media Browser first. When you send straight to iDVD it is expected DV or AIC or h.264. With photos only, none of these exist.
After sharing to the media browser or iTunes, if Share to iDVD still isn't working, you can open iDVD, find your movie in the Media Browser, and bring it into iDVD from there.
I have been reading other posts about sharing from iMovie to iDVD. Am I understanding correctly >that I the largest size I can go to is 'medium'? In my experiments, I have been choosing 'large' and >they look OK. (I chose 'large' because that was what was modelled in the tutorial.) Would I have >trouble when it comes to burning them?
Both will work. DVDs are 480i, so if you send in large, iDVD has to downscale. You may want to try it both ways to see which gives you better results.

Non-linear Ken Burns effect?

I want to do more interesting Ken Burn effects than the overused linear panning and zooming. How do you animate graceful curves in your motion paths without having to painstakingly add a keyframe for every adjusted angle?

Two corrections to what I said earlier. The Fotomagico card doesn't work with an OLDER Radeon card, but does work with the current one. And, it is a very convenient program for a polished looking slideshow. However, if you'd like to put any custom transitions or time it accurately to the beat of the music, it's difficult to make changes once you've brought it into FCP.
That being said, I figured out how to get a decent Ken Burns effect. Make the photo the duration you'd like. Slice the photo at the desired duration for the pan, then keyframe that portion. Make the ending keyframe points from that section, the starting points for the next one and keyframe the zoom. Breaking it into two clips seems to come out much better.

Converting slideshow from .mov to iPod loses the Ken Burns effect

I've been trying to make slideshows from iPhoto that will work on my iPod/iPhone. So far the only process I've found is to export to QT from iPhoto, then take that .mov and "convert for iPod". This works fine, however I noticed the nice Ken Burns effect is now gone.
Any thoughts?

Use a different app to make the movie.
But, if the destination is an iPod screen, then it's always going to be compressed heavily, so quality is always going to suffer. The same thing happens when your high quality photos are burned to DVD and folks wonder what's gone wrong - but it's the format of DVD itself that's the problem.
Other than that:
iPhoto's export options are pretty thin. Using something like PhotoToMovie or Final Cut Express in conjunction with Quicktime Pro will give you exported movies up to HD quality.
Regards
TD
Message was edited by: Terence Devlin

How can I modify the Fit, Crop, or Ken Burns effect for the entire movie?

How can I modify the Fit, Crop, or Ken Burns effect for the entire movie? I've been having to go through them all individually which takes forever.

You could try Edit > Select All then click on the crop button and change the setting from Ken Burns to Fit.
I find that this only works if you do not have the Automatic Cross Dissolve transitions in place.
If you do, File > Project Theme and uncheck the transitions and remove them.
After you have changed from Ken Burns to Fit, you can re-apply them.
Easiest way in future is to set up your project (File > Project Properties) before you start adding photos.
z.

I'm looking for a High Definition Ken Burns effect

I put together an hour-long DVD every year of the best photos of my daughter. Every year I've used a program called *Still Life* to add the ubiquitous Ken Burns effect to about 25% of the stills. I've been very happy with the results.
But, lo and behold, we've upgraded this year to an HD television, and suddenly everything changes.
Now it is painfully apparent that *Still Life* can no longer do the job, as its output is noticeably non-HD.
I see how I can do the same basic movement in FCE itself using keyframes, but this movement is static. The thing I liked about *Still Life* was that it started the movement slowly, built up speed, and then slowed the movement at the end. It was smooth. I can't make FCE perform as smoothly. I get visual whiplash when it starts and stops.
I've found some other similar programs-- Photo-to-Movie, MovingPicture, etc.--but none of them output in the same high quality HD that FCE express does. I even tried *iMovie HD*, but it isn't flexible enough (you can't change the start or stop movement times, so that when I transition the clips in FCE, I lose the second before the Ken Burns effect kicks in, and so the overall effect is herky-jerky).
Does anyone have any suggestions for a software solution that exports high quality HD Kens Burns movement for a still photo?
Thanks for any help you can give.

Hi(Bonjour)!
I see on photo to movie spec page that you can export in full 1920 X 1080 H.264 codec, a high quality format usable in FCE.
http://www.lqgraphics.com/software/phototomovieoverview.php
By the way, how do you deliver your HD sequence from your mac to your HD TV set ?
Michel Boissonneault

Jaggies in Ken Burns effect

My Photos with Ken Burns effect usually have jaggies to one degree or another. I had same problem with windows programs (Roxio EMC 8, Adobe Premier and Studio Media by Pinnacle). I just bought an iMac because all of those programs would crash too often, and their Pan and Zoom effects produced jaggies. Apple has such a good reputation for video that I assumed their programs would not have the same problems. The good news is that the iMac has not crashed at all. The bad news is that the pan and zoom produces jaggies in complex pictures (flower gardens) or in pictures with a lot of lines (sail boats). I have read the boards here (thanks Karl !!) and I have tried many of the remedies (render in iDvd not iMovie, import with effect on, etc.,) but the results are still very very disappointing. it is almost misleading to say that you can add motion to a picture when the quality suffers so much on so many pictures.
But this isnt a rant - just a question. What do I need to produce a quality pan and zoom effect on a photo if cost is not a big issue? Is there an upgrade for Idvd or iMovie? Would Final Cut Express or Pro produce a better product? Would more memory help (I have 512 mb)? What do the pros use? I am willing to throw dollars to solve this problem but I dont know where to throw them.

Hi Mardot - welcome to Apple, and to this forum!
It might be worth looking at either Still Life, or Photo to Movie before trying the expensive FC route. Both of these applications create very good pan and zoom effects that can be later integrated into an imovie project.
http://www.grantedsw.com/still-life/
http://www.lqgraphics.com/phototomovie.php
You probably should up-grade your imovie. imovie 6 is part of the iLife 6 suite of applications, which includes iDVD as well. Just be aware that iMovie 6, or indeed FC uses 'non-destructive' editing which needs much more storage space.
It would be a good idea also to list your computer model, RAM etc in your profile as this will then appear at the bottom of your posts. It can be helpful when diagnosing problems.

Ken Burns effects in iWeb

Sorry if this is a dumb question. Im new to iWeb and am trying to to build a home page with photos as the background that rotate from one to another and have the Ken Burns effect on them while they are on screen. Any way to do this?

Lew ~ Welcome to the discussions. If you're referring to the background in iWeb's Inspector > Page pane > Layout tab, it's not possible to use anything but a static image — although perhaps someone could figure out how to use a moving image as a background outside of iWeb's Inspector.
An alternative is a large movie slideshow with the Ken Burns effect — but it may take some time to begin playing in a browser and, if it was a Flash slideshow, would tax the viewer's processor considerably. (A QuickTime movie would be less taxing on the processor.)
A compromise is to avoid the Ken Burns effect and simply create a QT movie slideshow having a basic fading transition. Here's an example (not mine) — note how fast it loads in your browser:
http://www.heese-cadieux.com
...and it's done like this:
iPhoto > select photos > File > Export... > QuickTime tab ...set width and height, etc.
Then iWeb > Media button > Movies tab ...drag in your movie created above by iPhoto.
Then iWeb > Inspector > QuickTime tab ...settings.
Note: The above generates a QT slideshow pseudo movie of small file size and thus appears quickly in a web browser. By pseudo, I mean that the non-fading parts of the movie sequence are actually one single static frame timed to stay on screen — not a series of movie frames.

Zooming into video clip a la Ken Burns effect

Sorry for what may be a dumb question with an obvious answer, but I've not ever seen this come up in any FCP forum.
Does the "Ken Burns" effect also work on video clips? That is, if you have a one camera interview shot or tutorial, can you "zoom" in on the person as you might with a still photo? If I had a 2nd camera or some one to shoot for me, it would be less of an issue. But, just to have some movement occasionally instead of a static talking head would be nice. I suppose if overdone, focus and quaility issues would come into play.
Thanks,
Dave

Tom Wolsky wrote:
The explanation isn't quite right. Scaling is a logrithmic animation. An image at 100% scale fills the screen; when the image is at 50% scale it's a quarter size of the screen. This is why when you scale an image up it seems to get slower and slower as it scales up, and vice versa. Position on the other hand is a linear animation . The difference in the two is the problem.
Tom, you have great experience of this, so I'm a little wary of criticising but are you sure? I see that when scaling an image its area does not vary linearly (technically it's quadratic, not logarithmic, I think) and this will produce the illusion of changing speed which you speak of. Nevertheless, any given point in the image will move with constant speed.
On the other hand, position is not implemented linearly in FCP X. I set up a simple animation to test this, and at the start and end of the movement, the image's Y-coordinate changes by 2 pixels per frame of animation, whereas at the mid-point it changes by 6 pixels per frame: three times as fast.

Mixing Ken Burns effected images w/ stills

I'm creating a slideshow that mixes images with the Ken Burns effect on, and images with the effect turned off. I've noticed that when I place a non-Ken Burns'd image immediately after a Ken Burns'd image, the playback isn't accurate. The still image appears black or doesn't accuratly play back what's represented on the timeline.
I've dug through a lot of threads here but haven't found my answer. And help or just links to other threads would be great!

The workaround for this, for people running Snow Leopard, is to insert a smallest possible Cross Dissolve transition between the Ken Burns clip and the still. Actually, probably any transition will work.
The problem seems to be related to Quicktime 7.6.6, and manifests with stills, not movie clips. However, Snow Leopard folks, unlike those running Leopard, have not successfully been able to revert to an earlier version of Quicktime--at least as far as I know. You will notice that the problem does not manifest between Ken Burns photos or video clips, but only when non-Ken Burns stills are involved. Ken Burns stills are really movie clips. Inserting a transition will also turn a still into a movie clip. Thus evolves the workaround.
Hope this works for you.

Preview of Ken Burns Effect is a black screen!!

So, I am doing a movie for my parents, and I have 102 photos that I have loaded into IMovie. I loaded them in to the clips section, as I am not a huge fan of iPhoto personally. At first, no problems, but later, as I dragged photos into the playhead area, my photos wouldn't allow me to preview the Ken Burns Effect. I would drag them into the playhead, click on "Meda" button, and then select the Show Picture Settings button. The preview screen goes black as the effect scrolls through the process, disallowing me to see the preview. I have deleted the pictures from IMovie, re-inserted them, and started over (AAAARRRRRGGGGGG!), and it happened again.
Any Ideas? Thanks for the help!
Oh, and I have made no modifications to my machine (no new graphics card), and the pictures are all in .jpg format.

Hi Tonyy13.
I am presenting the same problem. I can set the Ken Burns' effect while I am with the pictures before placing them in the Clip or Timeframe viewer. After placing them there, if I try to edit the picture (either by right clicking and choosing -edit picture or by control clicking and doing the same, I ended up with a black background. If you change the setting in this black ackground and update this changes they will be effective. So, you can change the slide duration, and everything in the sliders but without an image.
I was running System 10.3.9 and I thought this was the reason. Today, I went and bought Tiger but it didn't sove the problem. I do believe it is a bug in the program. According to Apple's Help and David Pogue's "The Missing Manual" this shouldn't happen.
If you solve this problem reply to this posting. If I did I will reply to your posting. Thank You.

Ken Burns Effects Don't Work in iMovie HD (I've Tried Everything)

Version:
OS X 10.4.10
iMovie 6
*Hardware 1:*
PowerMac G4 Dual 500 Mhz, 1GB RAM, Internal 40GB HDD and Internal 320 GB HDD
*Hardware 2:*
PowerBook G4 500 Mhz, 512MB RAM, Internal 20 GB HDD
Problem:
This problem occurs on both of my G4 Macs. In iMovie HD, I imported a JPEG from iPhoto with Ken Burns Effects on. The still photo appeared properly in the Clip Viewer initially, but appeared as a black screen in the iMovie Monitor. Once the imported photo with the Ken Burns Effects completed rendering, the clip in the Clip Viewer turned white and appeared as a white screen in the iMovie Monitor. I have tried almost everything I read about in these forums in search of a resolution.
*Resolutions that Failed:*
1. The photo is definitely a .jpg
2. Tried importing the actual .jpg file as well as importing from iPhoto.
3. QuickTime and all other Software updates have been applied and are running on the most current release.
4. Repaired disk permissions.
5. Created, saved and manipulated the iMovie file in the standard Movie Folder on my main internal hard drive. (i.e. – I'm not saving to an external HDD)
6. Created, saved and manipulated the iMovie file in the standard Movie Folder on my secondary internal hard drive. (i.e. – I'm not saving to an external HDD)
7. Deleted the 'mac.imovie.plist' file and created a new one.
8. Attempted to do apply the effects logged on as a different user.
9. Saved file, restarted machine and reopened numerous times but the problem persists.
10. Tried a lower resolution photo and the problem persists.
11. Attempted to import all the photos I planned to use, added transitions to all of the clips and rendered completely. Saved the file, restarted the machine and reopened the file with no change to the blank clips.
12. The iMovie trash emptying issue did nothing to help.
*Additional Notes:*
1. The problem is confined to the Ken Burns Effects in iMovie. I am able to work with true video clips without incident.
2. Ken Burns Effects operate properly in iPhoto 6 using the slideshow functionality.
3. I would use iPhoto, but it seems like it would be easier to line up specific sections of an audio track with certain Ken Burns Effects in iMovie. (i.e. – a crescendo at the 16 second mark of the audio track coincides with the end of a 'zoom' on a photo, transition from second 16-17 second mark, new photo at the 17 second mark and pan left to right from 17 second mark to the 25 second mark.) Point is that it lines up precisely with the markers on the audio track, which seems far easier to do in iMovie than iPhoto.
4. Please help me, I'm going nuts troubleshooting this bug! I can't find any resolution that works.
Thanks in advance for the help.
Message was edited by: Charlie Brown Jr.

Hmmm. You seem to have tried, without success, most if not all of the methods of resolving a Ken Burns black screen issue.
Some thoughts that have occurred to me:
1. Perhaps your G4 500mhz Mac is not fast enough. I think that the minimum spec for iLife '06 is 733mhz. Might have nothing to do with this problem, but I just mention it.
2. Are the sizes of your images too large, as can happen with some of these new high def cameras? iMovie has trouble working with very large images.
3. Do you have any 3rd pary plug-ins, particularly in Quick Time, that could be causing a conflict?
4. Do you have enough disk space for the project to operate?
5. Have you done a recent Quick Time update? Some users have reported a problem with that.
6. From your post, it appears that you have continuously worked within the same iMovie file that exhibits the Ken Burns problem. If this is true, try creating a new iMovie project and experimenting with a few clips to see if the problem persists in the new project.
Ken Burns issues can be very frustrating. I think that you will need to keep trying things until something works. Wish I could be more help, but perhaps some of the tech experts on this forum will have some workable suggestions.
There is an application called Photo to Movie that reputedly has a far better Ken Burns type of effect. If you can't resolve your problem, you might try downloading that app. I believe that it offers a demo download.
Good luck.

How to turn off ken burns effect in new imovie

The new iMovie---11-- how in the heck do I turn off the Ken Burns effect? Nothing against Mr Burns but.... I don't want everything to move!
Thanks!

Go to File/Project Properties and you can define the default behavior for adding stills to your project.
After clicking File/Project Properties, you will click on the Timing Tab. There you will see how to set the default still photo duration and the initial photo placement.
You an set it as Ken Burns, Fit, or Crop. You can always change it later in the Rotate, Crop, Ken Burns tools, but if you are importing a lot, it makes sense to set the default as the one you are most likely to need.

Problems with Ken Burns effect

Having a very frustrating time trying to get a decent slideshow. Like the KB effect but when I play it back the images jerk and jump. Smoothness totally
gone. Strange thing is sometimes it is worse than others. Have tried closing all
other unnecessary programs to save RAM , etc...does not help. Sometimes it
looks ok played in iphoto but when I send to idvd the jerking is back. HELP.
When going through process have about 250MB free and 10 GB on disk.
Also when I export a slideshow (size-large 720X480)to Quicktime image
quality degrades considerably. All I want is a decent dvd copy of my honeymoon
pictures but can't seem to accomplish this. Am very disappointed at all the
grief involved in this...any help would be greatly appreciated.

Greetings Old Toad.
It seems that a fair number of users have run into this same problem over recent months: namely, producing a slideshow with audio from iPhoto with the Ken Burns effect creates a "jerky" movie as a result. The advice I have seen is to either clean up your hard drive or get more memory. I consistently run into this problem even though I have a 1Ghz G4 iMac with 768MB main memory. I have tried this on my root drive with about 7GB available and on a firewire drive I have with ~30GB available space. I have also tried using Cache Out X to clean up caches and other various files, and still iPhoto produces jerky results.
The one workaround that has worked was to turn off audio. That seems to fix the problem, but I do want audio in these slideshows to put onto DVD. Others have suggested using iMovie to add the audio track, but reading in the output of iPhoto into iMovie seriously degrades the quality of the video -- not to mention that it is a very slow and tedious process to do this.
I would like to point out that this was not always the case. Unfortunately I cannot pinpoint the exact time when this started happening, but I could swear that I had been able to create slideshows in this manner before one of the many iPhoto upgrades I automatically received over the last year. I now have version 5.0.4.
Have you heard of anyone successfully fixing or working around this problem? I love my Mac...and this is one of the fundamental reasons I switched from Windows a few years ago was for the great photo tools. But now, without the ability to make DVDs the way I want, I am considering switching back .
1 Ghz G4 iMac Mac OS X (10.4.3) 768 MB DDR

Non-linear moves in Ken Burns effects

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for