Documentary effect
 

I am making a video where I will be using still images. I don't know how to do the pan and scan effect used in a lot of documentaries, especially on the History channel. Is there a way I can do this in Final Cut Pro 4.5? Thanks.

I typically use a professional house that has a camera pointed at a motion control platter who does computer controlled moves or stuff on the fly, or I use After Effects, but this is all doable in FCP, and many people are doing it just this way.

Scan the still images at a high resolution (if you are working in the DV format, 720x480 is your picture dimensions) then make your scanned image double that...1440 by whatever the height is. Bear in mind that DV footage uses rectangular pixels, where photoshop uses square pixels, so the dimensions of a full frame of DV video is 720x534. So you will have to adjust your calculations accordingly. You scan at twice the size (and at 300 dpi for good resolution) so that you can push into the picture.

Then import the picture into FCP, drop it in the timeline, and open it in the viewer and go to the MOTION Tab. There you can adjust scale, center, and angle. Use keyframes. Look this up in the manual as they are vital to this operation.

the easiest way to do this in final cut is to change your canvas settings so that it's "image+wireframe". now you can set keyframes and scale/manipulate/distort your image within the canvas window.

You can also use pixel aspect correction in Photoshop CS or later to size the image correctly for DV. This is on automatically if you use one of the DV image size presets.

Thanks for your help. I scanned the pics at double the dv resolution, and I simply keyframed it to how I wanted it.

I always just do this in iMovie. The Ken Burns effect is what you are looking for. Then, export it out as DV and use the clip in FCP. This is especially nice if you have a bunch of photos to do. Saves a lot of keyframing.

However, you will obviously have more control if you use keyframes.

Otto, what settings do you use to export your clips, I also do my ken burns in iMovie and then take to FCP, but I can't seem to find the setting that will let me do that without having to render.

In the Share... dialog box, one of the settings is "DV." It outputs a file with the extension.dv that is supposed to be a full quality DV clip. That is the setting I am using. I then pull the resultant clip into FCP.

The caveat is, you won't need to render it UNLESS you pull it in with sound. In my workflow, I go into iMovie to put the photos together, then put the sound in in FCP. I just accidentally tried to place that .dv clip in a timeline without disconnecting the audio patch panels, and it wanted a render. I undid that, disconnected the patch panels, and replaced just the video. Voila. No need to render.

It could be that iMovie is exporting the audio at 44.1 instead of 44.8, which would make a mandatory render. I am not sure. But I do know that it works without rendering if you do just the video stream.

why do you need to use imovie when you have fcp? you can be your own ken burns and keyframe it yourself, with even better results than imovie.

As I said in my first post on the subject, you will have much more control over the clip in FCP. But if you are trying to put something together and time is an issue, iMovie is very fast. Especially if you, like me, have to put together 3 slideshows of 132, 133, and 67 photos. It isn't the focus of what I do, so I want to get done with it as efficiently as possible. When I have just one or two, I do keyframe it.

fcp is perfect for this because i can perfectly keyframe a shot, then paste attributes to the other 130 images and voila, it's all keyed just like the first one. of course, what i really do is make 3 or 4 different variants of this and paste attributes in a semi-random form so that they don't turn out repetitive.

either way, to each his own. i just want to point out another way to do it.