How To: Create the Ken Burns Effect in Final Cut Pro

Create the Ken Burns Effect in Final Cut Pro

In this video, Israel Hyman demonstrates the "Ken Burns Effect." Using this technique, you can use still photos to add interesting effects to your videos. It's dead simple to do in iMovie, but Final Cut Pro works just as well!

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8 Comments

@Fark Yew - Perhaps your problem has to do with you using Express 4.0. This tutorial is for Final Cut Pro - it's very direct and simple. Taught me in minutes. Maybe you should change your "f**king attitude. Good luck and have a nice day.

This is good as far as it goes - what I'd love to see is how to speed up and slow down the pan or zoom at will, move in to one part of the photo, linger, move slowly then faster out only to zoom in on another part - like the real motion camera Ken Burns used to do his visual effect. Any takers to teach us how to to that? I would be very grateful indeed!

When I do this, when I export to QT the video picture looks like it is doing a dissolve action.... fades into full picture. I follow these directions exactly.

In a real Ken Burns effect move, the objects move with inertia, speeding up and slowing down - for example zooming times 2 over 10 seconds, but slowing to a stop at the end - with a displacement curve rather than a displacement line. Do you know how to do that in FCP?

I cannot get the start square to include the whole of the photograph. I can drag it around with difficulty, but cannot expand it.

I have managed to expand every photo in the storyline about fifty times, and cannot work out to get back to just one of each picture. Can you help me. I cannot work with my show like this and have put a lot of previous work into it. Please help me.

This is awesome. A much more concise way to add the Ken Burns Effect than I watched in other videos! Thanks!

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