As many of us often do, we get into the situation that we need to implement photos into a video (documentary, image film, reportage,… you name it) The easy way of doing this is to simply zoom into the photo or pan over it. If you want to give your photos more “life” you begin to draw masks and animate single parts of the picture to give the illusion of some camera movement. This can be very time consuming. So I started to build a tool wich helps me do this and cuts the time doing so tremendously. I have been using and improving it for half a year now and it has already saved me so much time.
I figured it is ready for me to share it and make it available to you. This doesn’t mean that I consider this project finalised. I will upgrade and implement more features – guaranteed. So if you buy it now you will have all the updates in the future too 
Check back and get the free upgrades. At the moment you can do the following:
- define a mask (often a simple & quick rough mask will work perfectly)
- 8 layers will be generated from this mask
- define the layer size
- you can pull the layers in two different ways at the same time: 1) The weighting is more defined at the outside layers 2) The weighting is more defined on the inside layers
- push camera or object in & out (depending on how you draw/use mask)
- Pull focus (between innermost and outermost layer)
- define edge blur of layers (feathering)
- Activate “Visual Help Mode” to make adjustments easily visible
- two resolutions: 1920×1080, 3840×2160
I’ve found that randomly playing around with the options yields fun and crazy results, it’s really easy. There are many possibilities to animate your photos. Try it!
It is pretty easy to use, but there are some tricks i’ve figured out to get some cool results. So I have made a 25 minute tutorial to show you different kinds of approaches for different types of photos.
Please keep in mind that this is no “super magic tool”, and there will still be some kinds of photos which will work better then others. Especially photos with many things in the foreground and background are more difficult. But for most of the photos I have tried it on, it worked great. But don’t worry, I already have ideas to make the tool better and work with even more kinds of photos. Updates are of course for free!
If you have any wishes or ideas that you want me to implement, don’t hesitate to write me! I’m always happy to get some input and feedback. This will help me improve the tool greatly!
What you get:
- After Effects CS4 composition (Will work with CS4 and higher)
- 25min Tutorial
- PDF document with the controls explained
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no music included (great music track from Twisterium is available here:Speed)
no pictures included (pictures I used are all from unsplash.com / thanks to all photographers and people who made that website, you rock!)
