Prolost Burns

When I was creating the demo video for the Prolost Lightroom Presets, I wanted a quick way to create the classic zooming/dissolving photo montages known as the “Ken Burns effect.” And because sometimes your scaffolding needs scaffolding of its own, I decided to make an Animation Preset to speed the process.

Prolost Burns is an Animation Preset for Adobe After Effects CS6 and greater that automates the process of creating this type of animation. It’s so handy that I thought you might get some use out of it yourself.

• Set the start and end zoom values, and your layer will smoothly zoom over its entire duration. Changing the layer’s length automatically adjusts the animation.
• Use any comp size and any layer size.
• Layers automatically cross-dissolve based on how they overlap in the timeline.
• Set a custom center point for the zooming animation, to draw the viewer’s focus.
• Apply the preset to many layers at once for a near instantaneous setup.
• Works with Adobe After Effects CS6 and CC, Mac and Windows.

Prolost Burns makes it insanely easy to set up gorgeous photo montages. Get it now for only $3.99.

Comments

[Rob Hunt]

Cool plugin, can't wait to try it out.
I love that the transition is based on the overlap
That's a neat store and cart you have. Did you build it yourself or is it a product?

[Jim Noetzel]

Perfect. Thanks for making this.

[Eric Peacock]

Stu's site/cart is from Squarespace, a very slick and nice platform that anyone who listens to Merlin Mann or John Gruber podcasts is probably sick of hearing about. But it's a great way to build a lovely site fast, with no coding knowledge.

In fact unless you're a web guy on the side (like me) it's probably the best cart option for the little guy (though Shopify is great too).

[Rob Hunt]

Cool thanks!

[Stu]

Thanks Rob and Jim for the kind words! And thanks Eric for the perfect answer to Rob's question.

When I first sold the Lightroom presets I used Gumroad, which is also great.

[Glenn Thomas]

Nice work putting this together, but wouldn't this effect be more suited to an NLE? In Vegas for example, photos dragged onto the timeline are automatically resized and cropped to the aspect ratio, dissolves are automatic by dragging one clip over another, and snapped pan/crop settings make it simple to zoom in or out really easily by the same amount for each clip. I'm sure other NLEs would be similar.

[Stu]

Hi Glenn, I'm pretty sure there are some Ken Burns plug-ins out there for the popular NLEs.

[Andie Moepse]

One of those NLEs being FCP X, with it actually built in. Or you could even get something like FXFactory where the "Pan and Zoom" plugin is even FREE. For FCP X, Motion and AE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg2_TvH3mTs

[Paul D]

Thanks for creating this! I'm just wondering if, as an added function, it might be possible to have the option of it distributing the selected stills evenly across the timeline, instead of having to do t manually?

[Stu]

Hi Paul, that's one of AE's wonderful built-in features. It works very well with Prolost Burns!

[Ben Gill]

Hey Stu, sequencing layers with this effect doesn't seem to work with Burns? When I sequence layers from top to bottom (like a staircase going downwards) it doesn't work properly, but when I sequence layers from bottom to top (staircase going upwards) it works flawlessly. What am I doing wrong?

[Stu]

You're not doing anything wrong Ben—the preset is simply designed to work with layers sequenced bottom to top.

To do this with Animation > Keyframe Assistant > Sequence Layers, make sure you select your layers from bottom to top.