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Ken Burns Effect with video not stills
I’m working on a project that is intended for the web. It will never go to tape. On the web it needs to be 320×240 wmv files targeted at DSL Cable end users.
I’m shooting DV NTSC 720×480. I was wondering if it is possible to do the (Ken Burns motion control move within the picture effect) to the video?
For example if my timeline is 320×240 and my source footage is 720×480 then I should be able to move within the moving footage. Or at least that is what I thought I should be able to do. Thus far it has not worked that way.
At times I don’t want to move within the frame so I need to shrink my 720×480 footage to fit within the entire frame (doing so using the motion tab in FCP) the footage once encoded looks bad. Or at least the large files that I shrunk down look bad. The footage that I never shrunk and used for the motion control effect looks good. To paraphrase:
720×480 moved around the 320×240 timeline looks good.
720×480 shrunk using scale feature to fit the 320×240 frame looks bad once encoded.
Any ideas? Is it a square vs rectangle issue?
I tried using a 360×240 timeline instead of the 320×240 so the pixel dimensions shouldn’t have been an issue but at this point I’m stumped.
Any ideas anyone?
Thanks,
Mike
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4 Replies
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I would only work in native DV for the edit.
When finished, I would then use QuickTime (etc.) to reduce the full-sized edit down to the size needed for the web.
Can’t say that I’d ever want to systematically “squeeze UP” (over-size, past 100%) the full DV image.
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Hi Mike,
there are two things that may helps you:
– In the Video procesing tab of your sequence Setting, set Motion Filtering Quality to BEST. May helps because you are resizeing.
– Make a copy of your sequence and change the codec to 8b uncompress. Make a test and you probably will get a better picture than with DV.
Rafael -
thanks. I will give that a try.
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Michael –
First, and foremost, please, do not call panning and zooming on an image “the Ken Burns effect.” He didn’t invent it, he didn’t perfect it, it was being done before he was born.
Second – I have done the exact thing your talking about many times and yes it works.
As others have stated, use a standard DV sequence setting. For a 320 X 240 final image feel free to scale your shots up to about 150% with no apparent image degradation – beyond that it’s up to how much softness you can tolerate. Export using Quick Time conversion to 320 by 240. Voila – done.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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