Ken Burns on photos with non-standard aspect ratio doesn't work

[sebalvarez]

Either using Ken Burns (the effect, not the man himself) on either iMovie or FCPX doesn't work very well if the photo has a vertical aspect ratio, or even close to square. The way it's programmed by default, it doesn't want to show anything outside of the photo itself, even if it looks ridiculous.

So any vertical photo will end up with starts and ends that usually go from the higher area to the lower one or viceversa. And obviously it can be adjusted manually for each photo, but when you have like 300 photos, many of which are vertical, square and all kinds of ARs, and you want something quick, the farther it deviates from 16:9, it will crop a huge amount and require manually setting the start and end.I haven't seen anything in the FCPX settings, much less in iMovie's, that will prevent this.

Does anyone any trick or hack that will treat vertical photos as 16:9 for this purpose?

 

[bogdanw]

You could turn them 90 degrees before adding them to the timeline, they will be treated as 16:9 when added, export the video and then turn it 90 degrees in the other direction.

 

[sebalvarez]

Thanks, what I ended up doing was to set the duration of each photo to 1 frame without any Ken Burns on them, which basically fits the photo in the frame completely. Then I exported as a PNG sequence and imported that into iMovie.

The reason I imported to iMovie and not into FCPX is that, unless I missed something, FCPX doesn't allow to set all the photos to Ken Burns, analyzing each photo separately, but rather applying it to one and then copying and pasting the effect, which would require me to adjust the start and end points for 390 photos, something that I don't have time for.

iMovies gets about 5% wrong, and that's more doable. But I don't understand how the barebones consumer oriented iMovie, a great app for beginners that don't require much tweaking, can apply the Ken Burns effect to all the photos at once, with individual analysis, and the pro app that is FCPX cannot.

 

[sebalvarez]

I discovered that in iMovie you can send a project to FCPX, so that makes things easier from the standpoint of having to adjust the photos. But the thing is, iMovie also sucks for vertical or weird aspect ratios, so the step of exporting to a PNG sequence is still recommended.