Bournemouth — Jul 18th 2017
Tony talked about the issues of integrating still photos into a movie where the image is a fixed shape (different from most still cameras) and expected to move, so a still photo following a video clip can be jarring. There is also a problem with stills shot in portrait mode that use little of the video frame.
We then moved onto iMovie's features for adding still photos. The Ken Burns effect adds movement to still pictures while split screen allows two pictures to appear together (and can use the Ken Burns effect at the same time). Other features of cutaway, picture-in-picture and green screen were demonstrated but of less general use.
Producing movie clips with still photos already combined in them seemed more promising and we saw Keynote displaying a succession of still images, moving across the screen in a "train" whilst a video played as a background. Any Keynote presentation can be made to play automatically, using timers, and captured as a movie clip to import into iMovie. The degree of control is quite small though and making several portrait images take turns in changing is quite a chore.
We then looked briefly at Apple's Quartz Composer app (a free developer utility). Tony had been surprised to find that he last used this about 10 years ago and, sadly, it has been neglected by Apple. A third-party utility was used to overcome the incompatible movie output so we were able to look at some examples. The tool is actually quite complex to use and there was little enthusiasm to explore it further (though Tony offered copies of his now working composition to show three portrait photos changing in turn).
The meeting is the last to be held at Solutions' current shop but we have been invited to use the new shop, just two doors up the hill from the old one (there is a separate post on the AUGW forum about this).
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Rick Churchill said…
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