Panning/Zooming with Stills in Final Cut Express

[Enzo Tedeschi]

The most basic way, I guess, would be to animate the stills by keyframing the Motion parameters.

Cut a clip into your timeline, select it, press enter. This will load it into your viewer. Click the Motion tab. Add a keyframe at the first frame of the clip, and at the last. Do this for the Scale and Center parameters. Now if you park on the second keyframe and change either of those parameters, FCP will animate between them.

If there’s a more elegant way of doing this in FCP, I’d love to hear from anyone…!

e.

[David Battistella]

Just to add to Enzo’s excellent post. You might want to turn the view image and wireframe on in canvas window.

You park somewhere on the timeline, adjust the image size scale and position in the canvas window.

Now move down ten seconds and make whatever adjustments you wan to scale, size and position in the canvas and you have created keyframes, if you move back ten seconds and hit play, then you see the changes between the paramters.

David

[Todd Gillespie]

…now batting third…
Enzo and David were spot on, but to give you a more contextual feel.
One of the ways that make the ‘Ken Burns effect’ look so good is the pacing and the flow. Half of that is done with your keyframes, i.e. how fast, how smooth, placement, etc. The other conpontent is the editing/dissolving to the next clip. You’ll probably need to try some different ways before it feels right.

Also, FCE usually will default to a linear move-constant speed from in to out. BUt sometimes it will look better with an ‘ease in-ease out’ You can right click on the keyframe and choose smooth, sometimes that will make it look even better.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Carol Glover]

Thanks, but I’m still none the wiser because you don’t explain how to do the keyframes