[ale] Special effects used while creating a slide show

[Richard Bronosky]

I'm going to try to put this to rest by saying that I use the term Ken
Burns effect, because I know that it is one thing that the OP could
have searched for and found exactly want he wanted. If you know of
anything else that I could have said in 3 (I'll even give you 5)
words, let me know and I'll start using it. (And "pan and zoom"
doesn't do it. That's too ambiguous. Those are the tools, not the
application.) But I don't care to type a paragraph on my Blackberry to
explain what the OP could have read as a result of Googling Ken Burns
(which Google auto suggest will expand to Ken Burns Effect for you).

As for the software, I totally intended to open it up. I should put
what I have on GitHub. The trouble I ran into is that I quickly ran
into the limitations of the hardware and needed to rewrite it to use
OpenGL, but I couldn't figure it out. Everything I found that
discussed doing OpenGL in PyGame of Python assumed that you were
familiar with doing OpenGL in C. So, then I decided to just learn to
do it in C. And, I haven't touched it in about a year. My goal
diffiers from yours slightly. I want to come up with a slide show
solution that can turn a low powered (free or near free) laptop into a
digital photo frame. I'm shooting for not even installing Xorg. I want
to create a uni-tasker that saves hardware from going to the landfill.
I think that there is some overlap in our needs so we could definitely
help each other out.

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 11:01 PM, aaron <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
>
> On 2009, Nov, 29, , at 6:40 PM, Robert Reese wrote:
>
>> Hello aaron,
>>
>> Saturday, November 28, 2009, 1:45:38 PM, you wrote:
>>
>>> On 2009, Nov, 28, , at 9:00 AM, Richard Bronosky wrote:
>>
>>>> What you are looking for is "The Ken Burns Effect".
>>
>>> Actually, the effect is called "pan and zoom", and it has
>>> been around for as long as there have been motion picture
>>> cameras.
>>
>> Except that it was virtually unused on static photographs
>> before Ken Burns popularized the process.
>>
>> Pan and Zoom is still usually relegated to video, while
>> "Ken Burns Effect" is almost exclusively meant to simulate
>> the Pan and Zoom on static images.
>
> As a lifelong student and 3 decade professional veteran of
> the film and video industry, I don't find these claims to
> be accurate at all.  Not only have I seen for myself how
> the common document pan and zoom techniques have been applied
> to still images in a number of popular documentaries that
> predate Ken Burns' work by decades, I find the technique
> common to film, animation and video productions in general.
> As a point of evidence, I'll reiterate that the fact that,
> going back many years before Mr. Burns gained notoriety,
> there were specialized motion control rigs and, eventually,
> software automated systems expressly manufactured and broadly
> used for just this purpose of bringing motion to static, hard
> copy and photographic images. For a number of years I used
> one of them for nationally distributed video productions.
>
>
>> The differences are subtle, but important in cinematography.
>
> Again, I don't see that there aren't any differences, subtle
> or otherwise.
>
> While I would agree that Ken Burns used the well established
> photo pan and zoom techniques to great effect, his use of the
> process is simply not so unique or original that it would ever
> warrant shackling this highly common practice of the cinema
> craft should to his name.  The singular reason his name is
> being fraudulently associated with common static image pan
> and zoom techniques is that the Apple corporation paid for
> the licensing rights to manufacture that association for
> their iLife product line marketing schemes.  End of story.
>
> peace
> aaron
>
>
> PS:  I'm still serious about the software project if we
> can agree to disagree about the dubious value of Ken Burns
> contributions to the cinema arts.  ;-)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>



-- 
.!# RichardBronosky #!.