Mac OS X Hacks

Make Your Own Documentary

Using only digital photographs, music, a $10 app, and what the iApps provide, you can put together a rather nice documentary.

A lot has been going on in the video industry lately. Emmy winner and master of the documentary film, Ken Burns, has rereleased a digitally remastered copy of his epic film The Civil War. The Digital Hollywood conference has come and gone. And someone named Chris Meyer has released a $10 application called Photo to Movie (http://lqgraphics.com/software/phototomovie.html), which I consider a milestone in video production.

Tip

Editor’s note: Apple’s newly released iMovie3 actually incorporates much of the functionality of Photo to Movie as a “Ken Burns Effect.” Still, Photo to Movie offers more control over movement and key frames.

Basically, this small app (approximately 1MB) allows you to take a photo or image and do a panning motion effect across it (Pan & Scan), a la Ken Burns. This caused me to have a strange time-warp experience; all of a sudden I thought about my old studio. I remembered editing video and doing animation on my $100,000 Mac Media 100 workstation (with a $15,000 10GB drive array, $20,000 in software, a blazing fast 8100 running at 110MHz, an unheard-of 256MB of RAM, etc.).

Then it dawned on me that I can now do more advanced video work than I could with that system, with a $1,600 laptop and a $9.95 program. Heck, you don’t even need a video camera to use iMovie.

Thanks to Apple, more and more people are exploring ...