Who Is Ken Burns?
“Who is Ken Burns?” The morning light was slowly starting to fill the CMCI studio as I spoke these words semi-rhetorically, the frustration beginning to show on my face.
“Why did you say that?” asked my classmate.
“It’s the default crop effect for photos in iMovie. I use that app so infrequently that I always forget about it, and I end up starting each new project Googling how to get rid of it.”
“Maybe you should write your Medium post about that,” she said.
Good idea.
The Ken Burns effect shows up in iMovie, iPhoto, and Final Cut Pro X. For most people, it’s a crop setting that allows them to animate a photo by slowly zooming in on it. For me, “Ken Burns” had become a mysterious character that embodied all the micro-frustrations of learning a new software. Surely, I thought, such a specific name must have a story behind it. So earlier this week, I set out on my quest to find that story.
I figured the effect must be named after a famous photographer. I was sort of right. A quick Google search taught me that Ken Burns is an American filmmaker who has won many awards for his documentaries. Though I didn’t recognize his name, I have definitely heard of his movies (I haven’t seen any of them, but I intend to remedy that as soon as finals are over).
By the time the slow zoom feature was added to iMovie, Burns was already famous for it. According to this New Yorker article, Apple’s engineers were referring to it internally as the Ken Burns effect, and Steve Jobs asked Burns if it would be okay to make that official. Initially, though, Burns didn’t want his name associated with any software. It was only after Apple agreed to give him equipment he could donate to nonprofits that he agreed.
I do not dispute that the Ken Burns effect is highly, erm, effective at breathing life into old still photos. (Actually, if you click through to that super long New Yorker article, you’ll find that people sometimes mistake the slow zoom and pan for historical footage.) Despite this effectiveness, I find it personally annoying that it’s the default “crop” in iMovie for a still image
The one thing I haven’t been able to learn yet about the Ken Burns effect is why it’s the default crop setting for photos in iMovie. The nearest I can figure is that it’s a small kindness on the part of the engineers who developed the software. Maybe they assumed that the average person who is just trying to put together a slideshow of vacation photos might not think to slowly zoom in on that shot of the Grand Canyon and pan over (and even if they did think of it, it might be hard for them to execute). Maybe, as a little gift, those engineers set the Ken Burns effect as the default crop.
After all that reading, the feeling came to me suddenly: I no longer hated the Ken Burns effect. And here’s the best part of my journey to learn about the man: I’m pretty sure that the next time I use iMovie (even if it’s several months from now) I will actually remember that, to get rid of that pesky zoom, I just need to go to crop to change it.
