Slide shows with Ken Burns effect and other linear transform

Hello.
Agree that this is very important and agree with these experiences. Kdenlive i mos promising of all.
Ken Burns equivalents are the one thing missing from any mid-range (or any?) NLE in Linux.

I am a Windows-to-Linux convert and I must applaud the effort thus far. Excellent and well done. Keep up wonderful progress.
There was a program in Windows, of a similar level, called Video Studio by Ulead. Worth emulating at this level for the KBs.
Video Studio did a very nice job in the video effect process to overlay Ken Burns effects on a video. Simple and easier than Premiere, another routine I used in that other world.
Emulating even one effect would be great, 3 would be fantastic.
Best wishes.
Gwt

Actually Cinelerra does the Ken Burns effect extremely well, in just about any resolution. I've done it in 720p and 1080p. It has a pretty powerful compositing engine based on a camera-projector model with keyframes, multi-image overlays, perspective etc. Results look quite good. Of course, you have to get it running and figure out how to format your footage and rendered so Cinelerra can cope, among other things . . . I had it running pretty well on Ubuntu 8.04  64 bit.

If you're just doing still images, you could just use Cinelerra for the still sequences and then render that and import it into Kdenlive.

I'm not using Cinelerra anymore for various reasons, but, hey, for what it's worth. :)

I added static pan and zoom, but not yet animated, which is needed for Ken Burns effect. I need to do more work on the sub-pixel/interpolated rendering to give smooth animation of pan and zoom.

You can utilize the Composite transition to get a Ken-Burns style effect.
Keyframeable zoom, pan and opacity is available.

But your milage will vary due to a nasty downside:
Interpolation between keyframes is linear (no splines!)
Consequently, multi-keyframe motion is pretty jerky and the overall result poor, sometimes unacceptable.

This is one of the key issue causing me switching between cinelerra and kdenlive on a project by project base.

Toby

Yes. Works well in 0.7.5.

You just have to keep in mind to select "black" for the second track to get it work.
The default "Auto" didn't work for me (there's no second track to overlay).

Hopefully Kdenlive's ability to do a Ken Burns effect of pan and zoom on still images will improve soon. Until then, you can get high quality and smooth pan and zoom with a FOSS app. The latest Cinelerra packages I've tried on Ubuntu Jaunty 64 bit pretty much 'just work' and are stable enough in my experience for this usage. The concepts and procedure are a little unfamiliar in Cinelerra but are easy enough once you figure them out.
1) Open up Cinelerra and set the project parameters through Settings | Parameters or by opening a new project. For instance, I will be doing a 1080p video at 1920x1080 with a frame rate of 29.9700.
2) Under Settings | Preferences | Recording Tab - at the bottom, set import of still images to desired length for your clip. You can easily adjust the clip length by dragging its begin or end frame on the timeline - but if you don't check off this box and set a time you will get a still image of only one frame or something tiny that will be hard to even locate on the timeline. I start out with a clip of 10 sec.
3) File | Load - select the still image (hotkey is 'O'). Cinelerra will do common files like PNG, JPG, and even some Raw files, I have used Canon raw occasionally. The added images will appear in the Resources window in the Media folder.
4) Paste image to a video track on timeline: select it and position the timeline cursor to the desired frame insertion point and hit 'V'; or right click on it and hit paste. Drag it to where you want it and set its duration to exactly how long you want your clip to be.
5) Make sure the Compositor window is shown. Adjust it's viewer zoom level so you can see the entire frame shown by the green rectangle with an x from corner to corner. Try a 50% zoom on HD material or a 100% zoom on DV. The zoom control is on the bottom control bar to the right of the transport control arrows. Make sure you can see the controls, which is an icon bar on the left edge. If not, right click in the viewer area and hit 'show controls'.
6) Now you need to see the camera controls that control the zoom and pan position. The icon for this is a crossed arrow with a tiny right angle in the upper right corner, 4th from the top. Hover over it, it says "Adjust camera automation" I wont go into it, but Cinelerra works with neat model for projecting and positioning images using the concepts of 'camera' and 'projector'. We will just be using the 'camera'.
6) The camera automation is a smallish window with values for x and y - 'pan' positioning of image - and z which is the zoom or size of the image.
7) Keyframes will control the pan and zoom effect. You need at least two. Position the cursor on the timeline at your first keyframe. Plan ahead and make sure you figure out exactly where you want your keyframes because it's cumbersome to move all the keyframes later. The important thing to remember is that you need to always set a keyframe for ALL 3 AXES, X, Y, and Z, or things probably won't look right.
8) To set a keyframe move to the keyframe frame and turn on the 'key' icon to activate keyframing. There is one on the compositor window and one on the timeline window. Either one will do. It glows when it's on. Now adjust the image by altering the X Y and Z values. You must set each value - even if you don't want to change it from the existing value, move it's arrow up and then back or something. The only way to make sure it is set is by moving it. You can drag the image around manually but I find that it's completely reversed dragging down moves the image up, left is right. This is because in the 'camera' model, you are moving the camera or pointing it. It's weird, so I usually end up just changing the numeric values or hitting the up-down arrows to change the values.
9) When the first zoom and pan position is set, move on to the next keyframe. Again, the keyframing mode must be on. If you are only panning, remember to joggle the zoom Z key anyway to make sure the zoom keyframe is also set, or it will go back to the default of 1. Likewise, if you are only zooming, joggle the X and Y keys to set their values. Etc.
10) You can do multipoint camera movements, like slowly zoom in one area, pause there, then pan to the right quickly and zoom back slightly at the same time, pause there, then zoom back out centered on yet another area. There is no limit to the combinations you can get. Just add more keyframes. Again, it's good to plan this out carefully including total clip length etc. Moving keyframes can be a pain because it's hard to move their position in time without screwing up their exact +/- values as well.
11) To actually see the keyframe nodes on the time line, in the multitrack window hit View | Camera X etc. You will see colored lines with squares denoting the nodes.
12) Now render the finished clip. Unfortunately Cinelerra does not have the greatest output formats. I find that the MOV format Quicktime for Linux is the most dependable. I also tend to use MJPEG as the codec, though mpeg4 also works. MJPEG looks pretty good to me and is easily imported and edited by Kdenlive. Oddly, if I play these clips straight in Movie Player or Mplayer, the aspect ratio is stretched way out as are their thumbnails. But they play and edit fine in Kdenlive or Cinelerra.