Everyone has digital photos. Photo slide shows are acceptable and commonplace, but the Ken Burns Effect is what makes the difference between boring and interesting.
Even iPhoto and iMovie add basic video movements to static digital photos. Your Mac can be home to an app that gives you crazy simple and elegant control over the Ken Burns Effect, but also adds audio, rotations, transitions, titles, and much more.
These are professional effects you can apply to photos in iPhoto and export to a video, DVD, your television, even YouTube.
An Easy, Cheap Way To Pro Results
One of my all time favorite Mac apps has one of the craziest, yet most memorable names. FotoMagico creates movies from photos.
And not just the simple Ken Burns Effects movies from photos in iPhoto or iMovie.
FotoMagico gives you control over every frame of video and it’s amazingly easy to create a finished movie that rivals professional results.
Four basic steps are all that are required to create very attractive, compelling video scenes from static digital photos.
First, open FotoMagico, click on the Images button, and select an album in iTunes. Drag and drop photos into the FotoMagico timeline in the order you want the images to appear.
Second, set the Pan and Zoom on each photo. FotoMagico can display the photo’s begin point and end point.
The Zoom and Rotation tools give you fine granular controls so you can zoom in, or pan across a photo over a period of time.
FotoMagico gives you detailed controls to manage the length of zooms and pans, the length of time the photo displays, even the length of the transition.
Third, set the transition for each photo in the timeline. Transitions can be simple cuts, dissolves, wipes, slides and pushes, twirls, and many other effects.
Fourth, add text to your photos. FotoMagico’s text tools give you all the fonts on your Mac. Text can be aligned left, right, center or justified. Add colors, change opacity and set start and stop points for text animation to appear and disappear exactly when you want.
Those four simple steps alone will give you a beautiful movie made entirely of digital photos from iPhoto (click on any of the images for a larger, more detailed, pop up version).
The Ken Burns Effect adds motion to each photo. Even text can be animated similar to what you see on broadcast television.
Once you’re done, export your video to YouTube, or burn as a DVD, or pop it into iTunes for viewing on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad. All the controls are built-in and self explanatory.
Alright, that’s just the basic photo-to-movie slideshow. FotoMagico does much more. Grab an audio track from iTunes and drop it into the FotoMagico timeline for background music.
You can even drop in video clips to the timeline and treat them just like a photo. The home version of FotoMagico is affordable, but even more professional features are available in the Pro version.
For example, FotoMagico Pro has multiple audio tracks and a narration recorder. It also includes Aperture and Adobe Lightroom library integration, as well as tools for color, chapters, and teleprompter.
Still even the basic FotoMagico Home version delivers quality video output. Caveats? Yes. You need a modern, fast Mac with plenty of RAM, and an SSD is preferred over a typical hard disk drive.
About Ron McElfresh
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