Using The Ken Burns Effect In iMovie

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use the Ken Burns effect in iMovie.

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So the Ken Burns effect in iMovie is a great way to use photos along with your video although you can actually use the Ken Burns effect with video as well. So here I am in an empty project. I am going to drag a photo to the Timeline. Now the photo will just sit there and be a still image for however long I set this clip for. But I can make it more interesting using the Ken Burns effect. Now by default this may already have the Ken Burns effect applied. You go to iMovie Preferences and you look at Photo Placement, if you have it set to Ken Burns then it is automatically going to apply this effect. Let's assume you have it set to Cropped To Fill or Fit and you need to switch to Ken Burns. You could do that with the clip selected down here. Click the Cropping Tool here, change the style to Ken Burns. Now this interface here is how you control it. You'll see two rectangles here. The first is labeled Start. The second is labeled End. You can switch between them by clicking in either of the rectangles. In the space where they overlap, like this, one click will go to one and then another click will switch to another. The Start rectangle shows you the cropping at the beginning of the clip. The End rectangle shows the cropping at the end. So you can see, in this case, the end is larger than the start. So if I go down here to the Timeline and I move across you could see how it pulls back. The cropping here at the end matches that end rectangle and the cropping here at the beginning matches the beginning rectangle. Let's check it again. You could see that's how it is.

Now you can move either one of these rectangles by just clicking and dragging it. So, for instance, I can have the Start at the bottom left and the End at the top right. I click the checkbox here and now when I play you could see it does exactly that. Notice it is including the black bars on either side since the photo isn't the same height and width ratio as the video. So I may want to make sure that the Start and End rectangles include the photo and never the black bars on the side. Now you can see it looks a little bit better. This is a really good way to showoff more of your photo than can fit on your screen at one time. 

Now you can also change the size of the rectangle by dragging in the corner. So, for instance, if I wanted to start with a really tight crop around Jack here and then pull back to a very wide view showing the whole scene I could do that by having the rectangles arranged like this. Notice the arrow here shows the movement of the center from here to there. So now what we get looks like this. You can go with a tighter cropping for the Start and a wider one for the End or vice versa. Each one creates its own effect. So I'm going to move the Start out here to show a lot and then have it go towards the tighter focus around Jack. So now I get this. It really just depends on the type of effect that you want. You could also keep both of them pretty tight to pan across parts of the photo. So, for instance, you could have it go from left to right like this. You could put the end quite near the size of the Start. There's no way to lock them exactly the same size but you could get approximately there. Then you have it pan from left to right like this. Or you can have it go from top to bottom. So you could have it go starting there and ending here which also creates a nice effect.

But what if you wanted multiple steps. You want it to start up here, then move down here, and then pan to the left. Well, there's no way to have it a start, middle, and end here. You could only have start and end. But it's actually quite easy to get multiple steps by having multiple copies of this clip. So if we select the clip here and Copy it. Then place the playback head here at the end and then Paste. We'll get two copies. Let's change the zoom a bit here so we can see these a little clearer and we can see we have one and then the other. It goes down and then repeats the down. Let's select a second one here. Go to the Ken Burns editor and swap these. So the start is the end and the end is the start. It's this button right here. So now, if we were to play the entire thing the first part would go down and the second part will start at the bottom and go back up. So what's useful there is the fact that this second part has the start and matches the end. So now we can take the end here, put that on the left. So now the first part goes top to bottom and the second part goes to the left. 

Now what if instead of actually moving the second part we just wanted to stop there. Well we could do that by just switching Ken Burns to Crop To Fill. When you do that the Start frame will become the cropping. So I do that and you see it stays there. So now the first part will move top to bottom and the second part just stays with that cropping. I'll Undo there so we get the Ken Burns back for this second one and we could actually Copy and Paste it again. So I"ll do Copy and Paste and now we have top to bottom, right to left, then right to left again. But I can change the second one here to be Crop To Fill so now we have top to bottom, then staying in that same place, and then right to left. Just remember that whenever you switch from Ken Burns to Crop To Fill the Start frame becomes the crop. So if you want the End frame to become the crop first, switch them with that button and then go to Crop To Fill. 

Then, of course, to change the speed all you need to do is change the duration here. So this first one is 3.8 seconds long. But if I simply make it two seconds long then the entire Ken Burns effect will take place over 2 seconds instead of almost 4. If you want it to be longer just increase the length of the clip. 

Another handy technique is when you're moving these around and resizing them if you hold the Option Key down while you are resizing it will actually resize from the center. So if you were to set, say, the Start right there and then put the End at exactly the same location Option dragging is a good way to zoom out or zoom back in keeping the center the same place at the same place. 

Now while the Ken Burns effect is a great way to bring photos to life it can also be used with videos. So here I have a video and this works particularly well if the video is filmed on a tripod so it's a steady shot. I can go into Cropping here and choose Ken Burns just like with the photo except it's going to be a video there. So I can have it Start at one place and End at another like that and you could see how it plays out over the length of this video here. This is a pretty long video clip so it's actually going to take a full 19 seconds to complete everything. I could make it faster by selecting a point here, using Command B to split the clip right there, and you could see the Ken Burns effect is going to be applied to each one of those. But I could take the second one now and then go in and change the Start to the End and change the Crop To Fill. So now the Ken Burns effect will happen in this first segment and then it will go to a steady crop after that for the second segment.

So there's a lot you can do with this really simple cropping effect of just having a Start and an End frame and you could zoom in and you can zoom out. You can change positions in the photo. You can draw attention to a subject or start with a subject and then span out to show the entire scene. You can go from one subject to another. There's so many things that you could do.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.