[ale] Special effects used while creating a slide show

[aaron]

On 2009, Nov, 28, , at 9:00 AM, Richard Bronosky wrote:

> What you are looking for is "The Ken Burns Effect".

Actually, the effect is called "pan and zoom", and it has
been around for as long as there have been motion picture
cameras.  If anyone should ever get any namesake credit
for the techniques, then it should be called the "Clile
Allen Effect", along with every other camera zoom movement
ever used in film or video, since Clile C. Allen actually
invented and patented the optics of the zoom lens in 1902.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_lens>

Pans, tilts, zooms, dolly's and trucks are all embedded
and fully standardized terms and techniques of motion visual
effects in film and video, and applying them to 2D hard copy
material is no different from using them to record live
action or real world environments, either electronically
or with a physical camera.

> It is the
> signature of iPhoto on a Mac.

Again, the only signature part of the Apple software
is fraudulently signing a marketroid name to a set of
standard and extremely common video and film effects that
have been in use for many decades. At the post house I
worked at in the 1980's we had a computer controlled pan
and zoom motion table that I learned to operate and used
on dozens of projects, including a freelance Amiga
promotional video that premiered to many cheers at the
1990 Amiga devcon in Atlanta. In the same 1980's time
frame, and this is years before Photoshop was released
and more than a decade before iPhoto or iMovie were
published, I was doing digital electronic photo pan and
zoom effects by scripting my favorite image processing
program, ImageFX, using Arexx on the Amiga.  I was also
using the first generation of desktop 3d programs to zoom,
dolly, pan and scan on 2d photos by image mapping them
to flat panels in the 3d space.  (-: Clearly, the 2D
photo pan and zoom technique should be called the
"Aaron Effect".  Time to sue Apple! :-)

There are now dozens of software packages that will
produce slide shows with zoom and pan effects. Most
any screen blanker with a slide show option on any
platform will do this effect.  Like the screen blankers,
most of the tackier packages just do prepackaged effects
that you can't really control or finesse. If you want
real control over the effect, you need a more dedicated
package.

On Mac OSeX, iPhoto and iMovie provide controlled pan
and zoom to some extent, but their implementation, like
the one button mouse, is very user handicapping and
limited.  There is a SlickEFX iMovie add on (some $$,
but reasonable) that provides a tool with much better
control, but not as easy to use as it could be. The Mac
OSeX tool I recommend and have been using for years
in this kind of work is Still Life -- it was a $50
shareware tool when I first discovered it, but the
author moved on and released a final universal binary
as freeware <http://www.grantedsw.com/> (unfortunately,
they didn't also open source the code).  Still Life
has an extremely intuitive and straight forward
interface and produces exceptional results.

If I was trying to do this in the current Linux
domain I would look at using Blender as the engine.
The feedback isn't as likely to be as immediate as
it can be with a dedicated pan and zoom tool like
Still Life, but the level of control you can achieve
doing image maps within a 3D program like Blender
is exceptional.

A little google searching suggested that KdEnlive,
an up and coming Video Editing program for Linux
(with Mac ports) may provide a photo pan and zoom
feature now as well, but I was unable to fully
confirm this.


> About a year ago I tried to find
> something that used the effect on Linux, but found nothing. I ended up
> writing my own tool with PyGame but never finished it. My goal was to
> make the best looking digital picture frame you ever saw. I would
> still like to finish the project someday.


Cool.  I would be very interested in collaborating on this
project if you ever decide to pick it back up or post the
code under GPL.  It would go hand in hand with my desire to
make an efficient, user friendly presentation packaging tool
that can deliver visually supported audio material in extremely
compact file sizes.

peace
aaron



> On 11/28/09, Jim Lynch <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com> wrote:
>> My wife received a link to a video that showed a series of still  
>> photos
>> as a video. A slide show, but with an interesting twist.  The  
>> slides had
>> motion, in that there was panning and zooming so it wasn't just a  
>> static
>> display for however many seconds the still was displayed.  The  
>> zooming
>> looked to be the same for each photo, going from 1:1 to 1.4:1  
>> perhaps.
>> The panning was different, sometimes moving left and down, sometimes
>> right and up, sometimes just left or right, etc.
>>
>> So I was wondering if anyone knew of Linux software to accomplish the
>> same.  I've produced video slide shows before but they've been  
>> static.
>> This effect was a nice feature and I'd like do the same if I could.
>>
>> When panning it panned across the photo on a black background from a
>> distance that showed the background on one or more edges.
>>
>> Any ideas?  I suppose I could write a script to run convert on an  
>> image
>> and create a series of images to turn into a video.
>>
>> Jim.
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>
> -- 
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>
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.
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