Look out Ken Burns!
by Brian Underdahl
If you’re a public television fan you certainly know who Ken Burns is. His productions such as The Civil War have created a new term in the video editing arena which is called “the Ken Burns effect.” Basically, this is a technique where you use still photos in a video but you make them move, zoom, or otherwise create the illusion of motion.
Pinnacle Studio has long been my favorite piece of video editing software. This is in spite of the fact that I generally have access to almost any of the video editing packages, from beginner to “whoa, that’s expensive.” With Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate I now have the best piece of video editing software I’ve ever seen.
We recently took a short vacation. That’s one of the reasons why things have been a bit off-track around here–it’s simply hard to take any time away and not come back to a real huge stack of things that need to be done. But the vacation was wonderful and I got a chance to put a new Sony Alpha A350 digital SLR through its paces. So, I came back with several hundred wonderful still images.
What does that have to do with Studio 12 Ultimate and Ken Burns, you ask? Well, Studio 12 Ultimate allowed me to create a really cool Ken Burns-style video using those images. Sure, it took a few hours to get the images in place, set the effects, add the titles, create the sound track, and add the sound effects, but the result was amazing. Without a doubt this was the best video I’ve ever created and there wasn’t really any video in the whole thing–it was all “Ken Burns” effect.
If you’ve used Pinnacle Studio in the past you probably already know that it’s easy to use. But this is the first version I’ve used which was completely stable and which made the whole process so simple. I could have gotten even fancier, but the end result was wonderful.
Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate is really the only one to consider. Why settle for something less when you can have the best?