PE1_iMovie

The Ken Burns Effect_iMovie

Since I have spend most of my creative career using still images, the Ken Burns effect in iMovie was especially cool for me. It allows you to utilize Pan and zoom on still images in a movie without changing an active movie presentation into a static one. The setting is default when utilizing stills with iMovie, but the Ken Burns Effect allows more control over how it is executed.

Lynda.com shows an example of a photo slideshow with dissolve transitions, but since I already have an example on the last 4 seconds of the embedded video in post Bp8 of my Blog, the principle can be explained here.   

First make sure that the stills you are using are in the iPhoto folder. (Drag it into the iphoto icon on dock, or open iPhoto and drag it into the photo collection. It will assign it as an event.)

From there, you can drag the still to iMovie wherever in the video you want it to appear.

Click the gear in the top left corner to open the inspector where you can adjust audio and video clips (whichever you have selected) Select Cropping Ken Burns and Rotation

On your screen you should see a Green start and red end square which instruct iMovie when to start and stop Pan and how much (if any) to zoom. Put Green square where you want pan to start, and Red one where you want it to end.

If you want it to zoom in make end square smaller than start size of if you want to zoom out, vice versa. 

To get a brief example already done, look at the last 4 seconds of the Bp8 blog to see the finished look

JCIII