What's Keyframed in the Wireframe?

Here's something you may not have noticed.

I think the keyframe indicator in the Motion tab of the Viewer is pretty horrible. It's buggy, has scaling problems and is generally trickier to use than it should be so here's a tiny bit of help.

When you set some keyframes, and you have Wireframe + Image on in the Canvas (toggle it with "w") relevant parts of the wireframe will turn green to indicate that they have a keyframe and that the playhead is currently on their keyframe.

In the above image you can see that among the green there are some white indicators, namely the "1" and the upper left and lower right handles. Here's what the Basic Motion tab looks like for this shot of clouds:

You can see that Scale, Center, Upper Right and Lower Left all have keyframes. Scale is the large X-like crossing lines, Center is the center handle and the upper right and lower left handles are right where they should be. If the "1" were green, that would mean that the playhead is on a Anchor Point keyframe.

Fast & Cheap Ken Burns Effect in Final Cut Pro

So you want or need a Ken Burns effect quickly and you don't have $50 for a plug-in and don't want or feel like messing with Keyframes. What's another option?

iPhoto. It's free and you already have it installed. The Golden Triangle applies here: Good, Fast, Cheap…Choose Two.

With iPhoto you'll get Fast and Cheap since the export will be limited to 640 x 480.

So how do you do it?

1. Load your photos for the Ken Burns Effect into iPhoto.
2. Select them all in iPhoto so they're all highlighted.
3. Click on the little "+" plus sign at the bottom left of the iPhoto interface.
4. Fourth from the left, or Fourth from the right, click on "Slideshow".
5. Name it, Make sure "Use selected items in new slideshow" is ticked, and hit Create.
6. From here tick ""Ken Burns Effect".
7. Hit the "Music" button with the iTunes icon and at the top of this sheet UNTICK "Play music during slideshow". Hit OK.
(OPTIONAL) Leave Effect and Transition alone if you want the Ken Burns look, but feel free to experiment with them though.
8. Tap Preview for a quick preview of the slideshow or Play to actually watch it. (Tap Escape to cancel the slideshow if you hit Play and have seen enough) (iPhoto will start the Play from the image that's highlighted.
9. Click Settings with the gear icon if you want to adjust the duration of the slides (images). The default duration is 3 seconds. You should leave "Automatic Ken Burns Effect" ticked. Repeat Slideshow doesn't really matter since we're going to export this slideshow as a movie file.
10. Optional - If you want to adjust the duration of a particular slide, click it in the timeline at the time (or use the arrow key buttons on the bottom left) to highlight it, then click "Adjust". If you want to fine tune a photo's "Ken Burnsiness" then Tick "Ken Burns Effect" and adjust Start or End, the Zoom and by dragging it around the starting position of the image. (Keep in mind the speed of the Ken Burns zooms is a function of the initial zoom position of the image and the duration it's on screen)
11. Hit Shift + Command + E to Export it. From the export dialog choose Large (640 x 480) [I'm not sure if iPhoto supports larger exports than that, more experimenting is needed] then select where you want it saved, give it a name and hit the Export button.

You'll end up with a .mov (MPEG4) 640 x 480 movie of your slide show you can then dump into FCP. Is this the best way to do this? Absolutely not; but it's fast. If you want a Cheap, Good -but not Fast- way to do this you'll need to bring all your photos into FCP then Keyframe moves on them (I suggest doing 10 moves then repeating them over and over with Option + V but that's for another post).

Scaling Text in FCP

Sometimes it's just faster to have a text effect done right in FCP rather than going to LiveType or Motion. But here's one thing you shouldn't do: when you want text to grow or enlarge over time with keyframes keyframe it's scale it rather than keyframing the font size.

If you keyframe the font size you'll get unpredictable results that usually, don't look all that great.