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PART I1I SHARING YOUR WORK
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IN-FRAME MOVEMENT
TRANSITIONS
In-frame movement is the apparent movement created when there is panning or zooming within a single, static image.
pans: A fixed frame size travels over time from one location to another.
A transition is the visual passage from one image to another.
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CHAPTER 5: SLIDE SHOWS [ 197 ]
Slide show applications let you move into, out of, and across the surface of a picture. This technique was devel- oped in the days of animation cameras that allowed an animator to make precise, frame-by-frame adjustments. If the camera moved up or down, it looked like a zoom closer or farther back. If the artwork moved from side to side, it seemed to pan.
zooms: A frame starts wide and then moves in a specified time to a closer framing, or the reverse—a zoom out.
Whether clicked through or automatically set, slide shows of- fer a variety of transitions that can add interest—or become distractions.
Computers simulate such optical moves in real time. The set of images below attempt to show how movement is cre- ated within a still photo.
compound shot: A combination of zooming while panning. The frame begins with one location and size and moves in time to a different location and size.
The simple straight cut is the most familiar kind of visual transition: The viewer’s eye jumps from one subject to the next. But over the years filmmakers have concocted a variety of familiar transitions such as cross-dissolves, fade-ins and fade- outs, pushes, and closing circles. All of these effects have made their way into the digital engines that make slide shows.
The pan from newborn to mom could go either way (left). The zoom from wide shot to close-up (middle) cannot show the whole of baby Henry without shooting off the frame. The compound shot (right) would begin with Henry’s right foot, pan to his left foot, than travel north to his tiny face. Tiffany Zehnal
Transitions must be used with restraint. At best they feel right as the way to join one image and the next. But they can also feel wrong—annoying, gratuitous, in the way.
This diagram shows three different types of transition from the blue flower photo at top to the brown and gold flower at bottom. The first pair (left) show a cube effect, the middle pair show a cross-dissolve, and the third pair (right) show a wipe up. iMovie 08 has a dozen such transition effects.