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Digital Focus: Take Great Close-Ups

By Dave Johnson, PCWorld    Aug 26, 2003 1:00 AM

Q&A: How Can I Animate Still Photos?

Is there a way to make an animation as you pan around a digital picture? Ken Burns uses this technique often in his documentaries; he takes an old photograph of a group of people and brings it to life by focusing on one individual at a time as he pans across the photograph.

--David Loewenstein, Forest Hill, Maryland

That's a great question, David. It's a technique I've wanted to add to my own tool kit. Thankfully, I recently found a way to do it. A program called Imaginate, from Canopus, delivers exactly this effect. This $200 program (actually, I found it for about $150 at PCWorld.com's Product Finder) lets you move around inside static images--a favorite tool of documentarians like Ken Burns. I've searched extensively, but haven't found a good way to do it with standard image editors or other less-expensive tools. If you want to make a movie that includes a pan around a digital photo, it looks like Imaginate might be the best way to do it.

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