Can Ken Burns Parallax Effect be done in SVP?

Cliff Etzel wrote on 10/15/2015, 11:33 AM

Did a search first and came up with zero results so I'm asking.

Is it possible to do the Ken Burns Parallax effect within Vegas Pro?

The effect I'm referring to is explained here:

I have Photoshop CS6 but not After effects hence my question.

TIA

Comments

rs170a wrote on 10/15/2015, 11:53 AM

jetdv (Edward Troxel) briefly covered this in one of his newsletters. Download the PDF and read through the article.
“Kids in the Picture” Effect

Mike

Cliff Etzel wrote on 10/15/2015, 1:27 PM

Another one of those senior moments - I actually found a tutorial on Youtube - I had no idea how simple it was!

ddm wrote on 10/15/2015, 1:49 PM

Interesting how this effect is now attributed to Ken Burns. It used to commonly be called "The Kid Stays in the Picture" effect because it was used so much in that great documentary about Robert Evans.

As a side note, the opening credits to the old HBO series "Carnivale" really took that effect to a new level. I remember reading a great article on it's creation which was touted as the most expensive opening title sequence of all time (for a tv show).

Anyway, it is a great effect.

Cliff Etzel wrote on 10/15/2015, 5:18 PM

I'm revisiting/developing more mixed media projects incorporating more audio slideshows as an alternative for lower budget clients like local non-profits and NGO's. This built in feature ALONE has caused me to rethink Vegas as the tutorials I saw using Adobe products is convoluted and time consuming.

My question is though would using an AMD based GPU provide better timeline performance? I'm hoping Old Smoke will chime in on this specific question since it doesn't entail actual video footage on the timeline.

ddm wrote on 10/15/2015, 7:43 PM

My experience with using stills in Vegas with GPU offers no timeline preview benefits. I just finished a feature length doc that used stills with moves extensively and I experimented with GPU on and off and there was no difference in preview. Of course, I'm using an Nvidia 570 so the AMD chipset might be different, if so, I would be greatly interested as I use that type of feature quite a bit in many of my projects.

DGates wrote on 10/15/2015, 7:58 PM

Yes, it can be done in Vegas, although After Effects makes it easier. We all got interested in this when 'The Kid Stays in the Picture' came out. But it took a lot of work to do it right. Ken Burns had nothing to do with that production.

To my knowledge, Ken Burns has never altered photos to make them multi-dimensional. He's completely old school, with only pans and zooms of the old photographs he uses in his documentaries. It's actually refreshing to see this, even in his new programs.

Cliff Etzel wrote on 10/15/2015, 8:27 PM

I decided to swap out my nVidia GTX-660ti 2GB card for the ATI Radeon 6970 I've had for close to a year and even with stills - the difference was noticeably better with the latter card. Given I don't' have After Effects, Vegas offers a solution for me so I'm going to try my hand at letting go of PPro CS6 since it can't utilize the GPU on a Radeon card and see how I fair using Vegas Pro since the playback with the Nvidia card - even with recommended drivers - is less than stellar on my slightly overclocked hex core workstation with 24GB RAM.

Dexcon wrote on 10/15/2015, 8:40 PM

I don't have Photoshop, but have achieved the same result in separating the foreground from the background of a still - and filling in the background as much as needed for a parallax effect in Vegas Pro - using Corel PaintShop Pro, which is a far more affordable alternative to Photoshop.