The Editblog

Poynter Online is a website about “everything you need to be a better journalist.” A recent post takes a quick but helpful look at the Ken Burns effect. The author interviews a number of journalists and editors (and Ken Burns himself) about how they use the panning and zooming of still images to help tell a story. If you’ve edited any kind of documentary-style program you’ve probably used still photos and may have used the Ken Burns effect. iMovie even has an effect named the Ken Burns effect. All non-linear editors have some type of capability to manipulate still images, be it Final Cut Pro’s motion tab or Avid’s Pan and Zoom tool. Motion graphics apps like After Effects and Motion can do a great job of producing very smooth moves with better easing in and out of keyframes. My personal favorites are the plug-ins Moving Picture by Stagetools and Lyric Media’s Pan and Zoom Pro. Of course there is the old fashioned way that we used to have to produce fluid moves on still images, with a machine like the Manipulator 3000 motion contol camera. Thanks to the AE Portal for pointing this one out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 10:17 am and is filed under Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.