Tutorial on Creating Motion from Stills

You can use the image preprocessor to create motion from stills, the "Ken Burns" effect. This tutorial shows a simple example of that. Doing it in SynthEyes is different than doing a 2D image zoom and pan, because, with the proper lens field of view, it is recalculating the correct perspective shift, as if the camera was on a tripod, instead of the 2-D image-being-slid-around look.

The display is a bit laggy with this 3K+ image. I realized afterwards that it would have been cleverer to downsample a proxy version of the image to set up the animation, then drop in the final image. In the tutorial, I turned on the downsampling, which may have made the display slower, because it must recalculate the downsampling too.

Notes:

  1. You can download the source image (7 MB) and the final output movie (1.4 MB). Image credit: NASA.
  2. The tutorial is 5:45 and 16.7 MB long. You can download a Quicktime version of the tutorial (20.5 MB). 
  3. The display is a bit laggy with this 3K+ image. It would have been cleverer to downsample a proxy version of the image to prepare the shot. SynthEyes could help do that too. In the example, I turned out the downsampling, which may have made the display SLOWER, because it must recalculate the downsampling too.
  4. Check out all the other tutorials and the manual too (after downloading the demo version).
  5. Mac version is the same, done on a PC (E6600 Core 2 Duo) due to capture software availability.