For many things though, this software is perfectly adequate and features less of a learning curve than FCPX. IMovie is a consumer grade program, so the choices are not as robust as in FCPX. That concludes a crop in to out pan in iMovie. Step 2: Choose the Crop icon to finish and play videoīelow is a video of the inverted pan to zoom sequence. For this example we are filling the view screen with the “End” frame. In the example below notice the center point of the “Start” frame and the center frame of the “End” frame and the yellow arrow showing the movement trajectory of the pan. Define your crop area as with step on above. This time you’ll diminish the size of your “Start” frame to crop into an area. Step 1: Starting close (zoomed) and moving out using Ken Burns Below are the steps for starting with a cropped frame and ending with a full frame. You can also invert this, and start with cropped frames and end with a full frame. That concludes a pan from a full shot to a cropped shot. Step 4: Press the Crop icon again to finish and play your videoīelow is a video of the final pan to zoom based on the above examples.

Whichever frame is selected is the one that you can resize and slide around your viewfinder. Here is how the view looks when you select the “End” frame, notice everything is dimmed but the selected frame (this occurs only when the selected frame is the smaller frame). The crop will fill your viewfinder when done. Move the end frame to where you would like it to be and adjust its size to the desired area you want to crop to. They are broken down and labeled A-E in the screenshot below: (A) the “Start” keyframe, (B) the “End” keyframe, (C) the center crosshairs for the start and end-along with the trajectory (yellow arrow) that your animation moves as it transitions between those two crosshairs, (D) the border of the active or selected frame is in bold the inactive frame is dotted, (E) handles that allow you to resize the selected frame while maintaining the aspect ratio, (as referred to in my previous blog). In this step I will explain five aspects of the Ken Burns effect that are essential to understanding how to use it. Step 2: Understanding the terrain of the Ken Burns effect. Step 1: Crop tool and the Ken Burns effectįirst, select the crop tool and the “Ken Burns” effect, as shown below. For this post and tutorial I will focus on the Ken Burns effect in both programs. FCPX offers many parameters to adjust for the the transformation and manipulation of your video clip besides just scaling between your keyframes. In FCPX you can also use the Ken Burns effect but you have the added ability to do this manually, and add your own keyframes through the use of the transform tool. iMovie does all the keyframing in the background for you. In iMovie your only choice is the Ken Burns effect. iMovie and FCPX apply an algorithm that makes this transition from the beginning keyframe to the end very smooth. This is called “keyframing” and effectively creates a meta marker embedded into your video clip as a reference point.

To make any kind of animated transition within a video clip your software needs to “key in” on the starting and ending frames to demarcate them. Early black and white films were at these frame rates. The human eyes starts seeing motion somewhere between 16-20 fps. There is debate as to the merit and need for this level of resolution (similar to the sample rate fidelity debate- 44.1khz compared to 96khz in audio sampling), but that is beyond the scope of this blog. made movies are shot at 24-30 frames per second (fps), but directors like Peter Jackson are just beginning to shoot at 48fps. Video is shot in frames, and each frame is a picture still.

This will let you create an animated pan (the effect of motion within a video clip) to a crop that has a smooth flow from one section of your video to another. In both iMovie and FCPX there is a function to do just this, appropriately named the Ken Burns Effect. Another approach to this is to use zoom as an effect to “crop” into your image while panning in your video clip, an effect if not originated at least made very famous by Ken Burns. In my last post I talked about zooming into and cropping an entire video clip in iMovie and Final Cut Pro X (FCPX).

Final cut pro zoom in on video