Ken Burns Effect

[Steve S]

Okay, I’m prepared to admit my ignorance here and wave the white flag. For my benefit and others like me would someone please explain what the “Ken Burns Effect” is?

Steve.

[Ken Cox]

see

http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclop.../ken_burns.html

and many mentions in forum archive

ken

[Steve S]

Thankyou!

It was the frequent mentions in the forum that intrigued me - this mythical effect that was talked about, without really being defined. Now I know and I can appreciate just what all those postings are on about.

Steve.

[Ken Cox]

Steve

if you download dvdsanta

http://www.dvdsanta.com/

it will make a quick and dirty slideshow using the Ken Burns effect

so you you will be able to see the actual effect

ken

[Lin Evans]

Hi Steve,

Here's a link to one of my shows using these effects. Works best if you have broadband.....

Lin

http://www.lin-evans.net/testflv/rivatest.html

[alrobin]

Lin,

I downloaded the trial version of Riva and tried to encode one of my shows, but received an encoding error message: "This can be caused by a not supported combination of parameters or by a not supported video codec." I did download and install the Riva flv encoder, but guess I'm not using the right pte video codec. I used the "custom AVI" option in conjunction with the Riva "flv" encoder 2.0 program

What settings do you use, both for PTE avi creation, and for Riva? Do you save the PTE avi and then open Riva?

[Lin Evans]

What settings do you use, both for PTE avi creation, and for Riva? Do you save the PTE avi and then open Riva?

Click the "video" in P2E then choose "custom AVI". Riva supports several of the Video CODECS but I like MicroSoft mpeg 4. Decide about the audio quality you need and choose the appropriate audio (I used 44,100 Khz stereo 8 bit). Also change the default display from the DVD standard to 640x480 or something less.

For Riva Producer I used a 30 frame per second encoding with the 44,100 Khz (click on the stereo sound box) and don't forget to click the box to allow detecting Flash. Producer will generate the code in the HTML file which looks for flash enabled browser and if it doesn't find it will send the viewer to the proper place on the web to install it.

I used the defaults (mouseover) for the player setup because with a 640x480 the player would be inside the frame and visible otherwise (if you displayed it all the time). I'm still experimenting with Producer and haven't tried all the various options yet. They have a website for help with the particulars and the developer is very "tuned in" so that he answers questions himself.

My suggestion is to first create two folders on your hard disk. One for holding the AVI file you generate with P2E and the other for holding the output from Producer and Encoder. The program will ask for the particulars to upload to your web (password, username, and URL). Don't include the "http://" in the link, just "WWW.whatever".

A folder called "work" will be created on your chosen folder on the web. This will contain the "filename.fvl" flash file. An html (which you name) will be uploaded along with an SWF file, a gif file, the Riva player, and a couple other files. After this is done you may want to modify the html file to use something other than simply a color for the backdrop. I placed a small snippet of code to use a cream colored canvas backdrop and to center the player in the display. You also have the ability with the Producer to generate text. I'm not certain yet about all the details because I'm still playing with Producer, but I did purchase it (Riva Lite) and will use it to upload most of my slideshows I want resident on the web.

It's an amazing little program. I searched long and hard to find something which could do what it does without purchasing DreamWeaver plus Flash extensions or FLASH MX 20004 - each of which are very expensive solutions. This one seems to me to be the best of those I was able to find.

Best regards,

Lin

[alrobin]

Thanks so much, Lin.

I finally did get it to work - the secret seemed to be the PTE encoder - I successfully used "Full frames (uncompressed)" and it produced a 2.1 Gb avi file! I'll try the MS mpeg4 encoder next.

Something interesting, though - with this option, PTE saved a permanent avi file on my HD. I didn't have to leave PTE open. But it also took about 5 minutes for Riva to create the flv file. There was no indication as to what was happening, but I could see that the processor was working away full-speed.

The resulting flv file from Riva was only 4 Mb. There was some annoying artifacting on some of the images, but it worked ok. The transitions were all cuts. I'll try your suggested settings next.

Thanks again for your information and suggestions!

[Lin Evans]

Hi Al,

Yes the uncompressed AVI is pretty huge but when you consider what it's doing that's understandable. It's converting still images to 30 frames each per second of viewing time (or whatever frame rate you've selected). In high quality jpg mode that's a "load" !!

Actually, for best quality it might not be a bad idea to use uncompressed. The Riva encoder will compress the files in the Flash FLV format. I suspect the artifacts are the result of the frame rate, bitrate and such which you selected in Producer. Artifacts result from attempts to over compress for reasons of making the files available to dial-up bandwidths. Choose a higher frame rate like 30 fps, then the highest bitrate and you "should" get pretty artifact free results... It will probably take some hours of playing with this to find a suitable compromise to get optimal sound, image quality and ease of use, but once we get it all figured out the results should be satisfactory in most cases.

Just for referemce, the FLV files I've created are around 80 megabytes in size.....

Best regards,

Lin