Slide show transitions: will I hate them in a few years ?

[Gints Klimanis]

Hi,

After making a few slide shows with automated effects (slow pan/zoom),
I'm starting to wonder if viewers, including myself, will be sick of all of that
motion. Slide shows during my childhood were switching slides, no effects other than a black screen briefly between slides. That was totally adequate. What's your opinion on the Ken Burns effect trend ?

[Mal Stevens]

I beleive that smooth transitions are easy to watch and most easy to absorb. If you use a lot of the others such as ones that are hard to follow I would think you would become tired of them. I have found "keep it simple and easy"
I use desolve the most and add others once in awhile to break it up. This is only my opinion and others may think otherwise. I hope this helps.
Mal. Stevens

[John C. Chu]

Why not have both?

You can have the full-Kens Burns documentary version with music/narration and in addition, include a regular slideshow/picture gallery that the user can advance frame by frame step by step.

Make sure you include the all original files in the DVD-ROM portion of the disc too.

That is what I love about DVD...you can incorporate so much.

[Les Wilson]

The Ken Burns effects are not a trend. What was previously available to the professionals is now available to the masses. Maybe the reason the slide shows of your youth were simple hard cuts and static was because they were done with a film projector? I know mine were. Regardless, panning and zooming over still pictures is like any other video effect. When done with taste and artistic skill, it will thrill the audiences. When done without taste and artistic skill it is simply amateur and conducive depleting your stock of barf bags.

[Gints Klimanis]

Ernest, yes, my childhood slide shows were with a slide projector.

I'm still not sure about anything more than hard-switching or smooth dissolves
for slide shows. I've made a number of animated slide shows with the Ken Burns effect, and my audience has loved them. Though, now, I find the slow pan/zoom effects to be repetitive, and I'm getting sick of my own work.
I found the same to be true when I used to produce my own songs in the mid eighties. Suddenly, digital reverberation was available to everyone. It was magical for a performance recorded in a studio to sound like one in a concert hall. Over course, I quickly moved from no reverb to over-reverb to mild reverb. Mild reverb is hardly perceptible by the average listener, so I wonder if there's much value in adding it at all.

[Les Wilson]

Gints,

This is a good discussion, thanks for starting it.

I see your point, In my opinion, it isn't a case of all or nothing. That is, Ken Burns effects need not be applied to every slide so it isn't a case of using them or not. I think that independent of how "the masses" use a given effect, there's an artful way of using it and those who wield it artfully will produce more appealing content. Personally, I try to mix it up. Use some fast moving hard cuts to go along with the soundtrack. Draw the viewer in or move them away based on the soundtrack. Reveal a subject with a pan as the audio track highlights the concept. I disagree with the adage that audio is half the video. When I sit down to do a music video, the audio is 100% of the video and I have to work hard to make the video worthy of attaining half of that. Commonly, it's less than half.

One measure of whether an affect is done too much might be if the average viewer even noticed it. It wasn't until my daughter came home from her first year of college that I learned how often reverb is actually used when creating a music track. As an average viewer, I didn't notice the reverb but that doesn't mean it didn't have an effect on my experience.

In my view, history is replete with examples of new techniques that hit the scene, enjoy widespread overuse but over time settle down to hold a place in the editors toolkit.