[ale] Special effects used while creating a slide show

aaron aaron at pd.org
Mon Nov 30 02:38:50 EST 2009


On 2009, Nov, 30, , at 1:11 AM, Richard Bronosky wrote:

> I'm going to try to put this to rest by saying that I use the term Ken
> Burns effect, because I know that it is one thing that the OP could
> have searched for and found exactly want he wanted. If you know of
> anything else that I could have said in 3 (I'll even give you 5)
> words, let me know and I'll start using it. (And "pan and zoom"
> doesn't do it. That's too ambiguous. Those are the tools, not the
> application.) But I don't care to type a paragraph on my Blackberry to
> explain what the OP could have read as a result of Googling Ken Burns
> (which Google auto suggest will expand to Ken Burns Effect for you).

Fair enough on explaining the choice of monikers for the technique.
Doesn't make it any less of an absurd obscenity that the fraudulent
credit has taken hold based on a consumer culture marketing stunt.

I'll offer "pan and scan effect" as my 4 word alternative, even
though it thoroughly proves your point in that the top 5 google hits
also include reference to the fraudulent namesake label.  I initially
composed my message using the "Pan and Scan" term, but changed it to
"Pan and Zoom" to avoid confusing this with the common term for
cropping wide screen cinema formats for transfer and presentation
in standard television aspect ratios (as an alternative to letterbox).

> As for the software, I totally intended to open it up. I should put
> what I have on GitHub. The trouble I ran into is that I quickly ran
> into the limitations of the hardware and needed to rewrite it to use
> OpenGL, but I couldn't figure it out. Everything I found that
> discussed doing OpenGL in PyGame of Python assumed that you were
> familiar with doing OpenGL in C. So, then I decided to just learn to
> do it in C. And, I haven't touched it in about a year. My goal
> diffiers from yours slightly. I want to come up with a slide show
> solution that can turn a low powered (free or near free) laptop into a
> digital photo frame. I'm shooting for not even installing Xorg. I want
> to create a uni-tasker that saves hardware from going to the landfill.
> I think that there is some overlap in our needs so we could definitely
> help each other out.

Very surprised that there isn't a library for the kind of simple 2D
translations that this kind of project would be tapping into OpenGL
to do (though you doubtless did a thorough search for one).

But yes, I see a lot of overlap for the applications and we should
talk more off list sometime soon.

Thanks!

peace
aaron


>
> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 11:01 PM, aaron <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 2009, Nov, 29, , at 6:40 PM, Robert Reese wrote:
>>
>>> Hello aaron,
>>>
>>> Saturday, November 28, 2009, 1:45:38 PM, you wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Except that it was virtually unused on static photographs
>>> before Ken Burns popularized the process.
>>>
>>> Pan and Zoom is still usually relegated to video, while
>>> "Ken Burns Effect" is almost exclusively meant to simulate
>>> the Pan and Zoom on static images.
>>
>> As a lifelong student and 3 decade professional veteran of
>> the film and video industry, I don't find these claims to
>> be accurate at all.  Not only have I seen for myself how
>> the common document pan and zoom techniques have been applied
>> to still images in a number of popular documentaries that
>> predate Ken Burns' work by decades, I find the technique
>> common to film, animation and video productions in general.
>> As a point of evidence, I'll reiterate that the fact that,
>> going back many years before Mr. Burns gained notoriety,
>> there were specialized motion control rigs and, eventually,
>> software automated systems expressly manufactured and broadly
>> used for just this purpose of bringing motion to static, hard
>> copy and photographic images. For a number of years I used
>> one of them for nationally distributed video productions.
>>
>>
>>> The differences are subtle, but important in cinematography.
>>
>> Again, I don't see that there [are] any differences, subtle
>> or otherwise.
>>
>> While I would agree that Ken Burns used the well established
>> photo pan and zoom techniques to great effect, his use of the
>> process is simply not so unique or original that it would ever
>> warrant shackling this highly common practice of the cinema
>> craft [] to his name.  The singular reason his name is
>> being fraudulently associated with common static image pan
>> and zoom techniques is that the Apple corporation paid for
>> the licensing rights to manufacture that association for
>> their iLife product line marketing schemes.  End of story.
>>
>> peace
>> aaron
>>
>>
>> PS:  I'm still serious about the software project if we
>> can agree to disagree about the dubious value of Ken Burns
>> contributions to the cinema arts.  ;-)
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> -- 
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.
>
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