Pictures on the Move -- Easy, Too
Move Over, Ken Burns: StageTools MovingPicture Tops Imaginate
 by Charlie White
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MovingPicture ReviewIf you're looking to add a professional touch to a sequence of stills, it's easier to do than ever. A few weeks ago, I reviewed a fine application by Canopus called Imaginate, which does a great job of executing all kinds of camera moves on high resolution stills. StageTools MovingPicture version 4.4 even tops that. I took a look at the stand-alone MovingPicture Producer ($199, $69 for the rotation option), and one of the numerous plug-ins of the same application, this one for Adobe Premiere, and was quite pleased with the results.

First I launched MovingPicture Producer, the stand-alone version of MovingPicture, where you can produce an entire sequence of moving stills, complete with zooms, pans, tilts, skewed shots and dissolves along with musical or other audio accompaniment, all without cracking open a nonlinear editing application. When you're done with your sequence, MovingPicture lets you make a movie using whichever codec you have on your system. By the way, it's great to have the audio accompaniment as a scratch track as you're editing your sequence, but it's too bad MovingPicture can't export that audio into your final movie.
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Click for enlargement -- Moving Picture screen shot
Click for enlargement -- here's a screen shot of MovingPicture. Notice the green area of the timeline -- that's where a dissolve is occurring. (Special thanks to my lovely wife for allowing me to use her picture).
Even so, MovingPicture represents quite a leap over what Canopus Imaginate can do, because Imaginate can only work on one picture at a time, and after that you must use a nonlinear editor to put together a sequence of dissolves. With Producer, to create a sequence you just pick the place where you'd like your next picture to appear, import the next still, and then drag the green dot on the timeline to create a dissolve between the two pics. It's a simple routine, and although you can't view the resulting dissolve in real time (a still sequence without dissolves plays back in real time beautifully, complete with moves and zooms), you're able to hit the + and - keys and step through your dissolve in near-real-time. On our Dell Precision Workstation 350 test bed here, running at 2.53 MHz, the app was snappy and gave us a good representation of the final product. The rendering out to an avi file went quickly, too, thanks to an improvement in this version 4.4 that makes the rendering go twice as fast as in version 4.0.

Another new feature is the ability to easily scrub on the timeline, where you can see your moves with the flick of a wrist. Beyond that, the entire app is extremely easy to use once you've figured out that all you have to do is drag the corner of a picture to zoom in and out, and move the center of the picture to change its framing. Hit Control, and you can skew the shot every which way in all its 2-and-a-half-D glory. Grab the upper right corner of a still, and if you've paid you extra $69, you can rotate the thing every which-way.

Adding keyframes is all automatic, where you move to the next spot on the timeline where you want to move to go, change your framing, and there's a keyframe marker sitting there. For more control, MovingPicture lets you turn the off auto-add feature and have it only add keyframes when you click the "Add Key" button. Either way, it's easy to use, and quick. Also easy to add and change are "ease in" and ease out controls, where you can fine-tune your moves and make them just about any speed and pace you'd like.
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