iMovie Tutorial: Add Motion to Still Frames

Video Transcript

"IMovie is a registered trademark of Apple. I'm in no way affiliated with Apple. In this clip we're going to be adding motion to our still frame here of the Boston Harbor Skyline. Now, if we place our cursor at the beginning of this clip in our project window and hit the space at the button to play it, you'll notice that the even though it's a still image, the image is slowly zooming out and the reason for this is let's go to our project properties here. Go to a file, project properties, hit command J and you can see where it says photo duration. It shows four seconds. That's when we brought the black frame in the skyline still frame. They originally started at forty seconds and it also has initial photo placement. It shows a pull down menu and it's set to Ken Burns. Now, Ken Burns was a documentary film marker who kind of popularized the use of slow zoom-ins and pull backs on photos to give them more dramatic appeal. So, they name this effect. It's basically a motion effect and IMovie calls it the Ken Burns effect and it's set as a default so any time you had a photo in, it's going to have this zoom effect but we can adjust the perimeters of that. If you go into your still fame and you see this little crop button, you click on that and look into your viewer window, you'll see you have two rectangles a red one which is kind of gray out and a green one. The red represents the image's ending point and the green the starting point. You could see that the start rectangle is a little bit smaller than the image and the end rectangle is the full image. That gives you the effect of zooming in. Now, there's a little arrow button near the start word here and that actually will switch places from start to end. So, if we switch the place and then actually play back our clip, you could see now that instead of zooming back, it zooms in slowly. I'm going to stop that. Now, you could also drag these to adjust the perimeters. Let's click this back to the way it was and let's resize this a little bit. We're going to resize the image and then move it to center it. You could see the arrow in the middle here. It's showing the direction of the effect. So, if we center it the arrow will be pretty much centered and now when we hit play, you could see that it's a much the zoom starts much closer in on the image. Stop that. I kind of like the original zoom the best. I'm going to make it a little bigger. This rectangle a little bigger really centered. Now, you could just to give you an example, you could make this very small and let's put this up in a corner see what that does. What this is going to do, you could see this small rectangle. It's going to just start the zoom in this corner. So, the image is going to start with what we've seen here filling the full scene and then end with the full frame. So, let's look at that. Now, this can be really useful if you had photos of scales of people's faces and you want to zoom back from say a smiling face to show the whole scene. It's a lot of creative ways you can use this effect but for our purposes we're going to just have a low zoom up because we're probably going to be adding some titles to this. Now, we'll use this effect a little bit more when we get into another section of the video but for now, let's just look at this. Okay, we have a very nice slow zoom back and this will work great if we decide to put titles over this."