Ok I'm a little nervous about Final Cut Pro because I have been a user of Vegas Video for so long. The Event Pan/Crop in Vegas is a god send and I havn't seen anything easier or comparable to it yet.

Can someone tell me how the Event Pan/Crop feature in Final Cut Pro is? The one in Premiere is a nightmare and If I'm making the switch to Mac in a couple of months, I'm not using Premiere (unless they fixed it in Premiere Pro).

Well, FCP doesn't call it event pan/crop, so can you describe the technique? Do you mean pan & scan a letter boxed scene? Or do you mean pan & zoom, aka the Ken Burns effect?

I'm working on a nice pan and zoom (aka rostrum camera / animation camera / optical camera) filter for FCP. What features do you want / need?

Graeme

Yes basicly. It's what you use for Photo Montages. Like taking a photo and zooming into it or making it pan accross the screen.

Graeme, I would look at Vegas and see the Event Pan/Crop. All the things they have there would be great to look at for ideas.

Final Cut Pro includes that feature and there are several stand alone programs that do a very nice job. My 10 year old son uses Photo to Movie and imports the QT's into iMovie. It could just as easily be imported into FCP.

FCP does have native features to do this effect also. Visit Ken Stones site (http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_homepage_index.html) for 100's of FCP tutorials. He has one on exactly what your trying to do.

It's called the Ken Burns effect.

I don't know about Vegas, but FCP is all layer-based, so, like photoshop, you can have layers that greatly exceed the edges of the frame. You can scale these and keyframe motion to your heart's content.

You can do this in iMovie with their Ken Burns Effect filter.

But basically it's very simple, you just keyframe position, scale and center parameters under motion tab. You an drag to your heart's content in the canvas until you like the look.

It's even better to do it in After Effects, where you have more control over the keyframes.

What I want to know is why everyone over there in the USA calls this the Ken Burns effect. Didn't rostrum cams exist before Ken Burns? Or did no one ever watch documentaries before Ken Burns? :-)

By crtl clicking on your keyframes I believe you can bring up bezier handles.

<<<-- Originally posted by FredFilms :

What I want to know is why everyone over there in the USA calls this the Ken Burns effect. Didn't rostrum cams exist before Ken Burns? Or did no one ever watch documentaries before Ken Burns? :-) -->>>
No, Ken Burns was just the first to over-use it! ;-)

fair enough -I never looked at it that way. But was this really still such a radical "effect" that a basic pan and zoom is now named after the guy? Don't get me wrong, I respect his work immensely, but I believe one of the strengths of his documentaries is the fact that he uses straightforward visual methods, no gimmicks. I'd hate to see people regard the "ken burns effect" as a gimmick.

Photo to Movie is the easiest and best! Check out what I did with it in no time at all (pics of construction of a single room in my friend's house). 20 MB Quicktime:

Clicky Clicky
(http://12.151.50.47/webimages/ftsrpics.mov)

I agree that Photo to Movie is a good app, however when resizing it to 720 x 540 it has some loss.

I've had great success with Still Life (http://www.grantedsw.com/still-life/) from Granted Software. It will import a Photo Album from iPhoto and automatically synch all the images to the music you select. It will even randomly apply small pans and zooms to each image (like the screen saver in OSX).

You can export to just about anything including files that will work with FCP. I like it because it is quick and a bit more intuitive than what you need to do in FCP to get the same effect. And it saved me when I needed the effect on over 100 images in a matter of hours...

Originally posted by Tom Neumann:
I agree that Photo to Movie is a good app, however when resizing it to 720 x 540 it has some loss.
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. Why would it need to be resized to that resolution? You can select PAL DV output if that's what you mean and it will output in that resolution. Also, it is best to use high resolution photos to begin with. It doesn't seem to like the PICT format, though, as it makes the pictues blocky. JPEG seems to work the best.