Merge with 'Pan and Scan'?: The Ken Burns Effect

Guess what this one means! I'm confident you won't cheat, since it's wick'd on just 3 pages other than its own, and doesn't look like it even went through YKTTW.

Now guess this one! It gets only marginally more traffic, but at least the title is pretty indicative of how it's actually used.

The Ken Burns Effect is a camera technique used pan around still images that keeps a viewer's attention as well as a moving picture would. Pan and Scan is when film editors have to pan action sequences after the film's aspect ratio is altered, or when animators draw a single large image and pan over it rather than drawing it frame-by-frame.

Unless you're an avid documentary fan, "The Ken Burns Effect" is meaningless. Even if you do know who Ken Burns is, "The Ken Burns Effect" puts one in mind of something closer to The Dulcinea Effect or the Westermarck Effect than "The Effect That Ken Burns Used". "Pan and Scan" is a perfectly suitable name for Ken Burns' effect — the article itself describes the exact same thing, only applied to animation and with a snarky bias.

Does cleaning up Pan and Scan to include The Ken Burns Effect sound like a good idea?

Panning across a still photo in a movie or video.

What do I win?

edited 22nd Jun '11 2:03:40 PM by Madrugada

Apple's program for making slideshows (iMovie) offers a zoom-and-scan option. It's labeled "Ken Burns".

Even if we think Ken Burns is not a good trope namer, I don't think lumping with Pan and Scan works. One is about editing a widescreen moving image so it fits on a square TV. The other has nothing to do with making an image fit on a screen; it's about moving a static picture across the screen so it's less boring.

EDIT: Wait, I didn't see the second definition of Pan and Scan. Now I wonder how in the heck both of those definitions got attached.

edited 22nd Jun '11 2:09:08 PM by MetaFour

For what it's worth, I've never heard the second definition of Pan and Scan used. It's always been the first one — cropping out a portion of a widescreen movie to fit a smaller screen.

Heh, the other wiki doesn't mention the second definition either.

Additionally, I didn't find any uses of it that way in a(n admittedly quick) Google search on (+"pan and scan" + Video games")

edited 22nd Jun '11 2:45:21 PM by Madrugada

Maybe instead we should move definition #2 to The Ken Burns Effect.

Upon further thought, I think the OP is onto something that "effect" makes it sound like this is an in-story effect, rather than a camera trick. Maybe it could stand to be renamed Ken Burns Pan or Ken Burns Zoom. Or Ken Burns Zoom And Pan.

Or maybe something that describes it. Who the heck is Ken Burns?

That was my bad then, I don't edit slideshows on a Mac and I haven't encountered the phrase "pan and scan" before.

Does this necessitate a split, then? We could do the opposite of my original suggestion, remove the animation portion of Pan and Scan and lump it into The Ken Burns Effect. They describe the same thing, only one is an animation technique and one is a film editting technique.

Edit: Oopsie, somebody just said that.

edited 22nd Jun '11 2:56:56 PM by Marshmello

Ken Burns Pan would make a lot more sense. "Effect" does have too many possibilities — the popularity bump in a subject following a special program about it; or the use of voiceovers reading period documents in the narration of a documentary for just two.

Ken Burns is the name that I always see assigned to this technique. As has been said in this thread, it's even what it's called in movie editing software. It does need a tag to it though otherwise it just sounds like a name.

'Ken Burns Effect' seems a lot clearer and well defined than the 'pan and scan' and describes something completely different.

The best fix I can think of would be to eliminate the second definition for pan and scan, which isn't directly connected to the first, drop that into Ken Burns Effect as an expansion of the term, and add a "compare to" the other one at the bottom of both. This would leave Pan and Scan as a term for material edited from another source to fit a new medium and Ken Burns Effect as an artistic style choice.

X Effect is a discredited naming convention, except for those rare cases where "effect" is actually part of the pre-existing term. "The Tetris Effect" is; "The Mickey Mouse Effect" is not.

edited 22nd Jun '11 4:07:39 PM by Stratadrake

Moving Pan and Scan #2 (which has nothing to do with the real-world definition of Pan and Scan) to Ken Burns Effect and renaming that one to Ken Burns Pan seems like the solution to me.

So, any objections to the proposal:

• Remove Pan and Scan definition #2 and merge it with The Ken Burns Effect.
• Rename The Ken Burns Effect to Ken Burns Pan.

edited 24th Jun '11 3:32:22 PM by MetaFour

None.

Oh snap, I just checked the other wiki and it seems like it's a pre-existing term.

Ok. Leave The Ken Burns Effect as a redirect. Haven't we done that before, with pre-existing terms that still weren't really clear unless you already know what they were?

ETA: It appears that we have, especially within the Camera Tricks index. The technical term for Blade-of-Grass Cut is "Associational Montage" and Gaussian Girl is simply "Soft Focus". In those cases, we don't even have the pre-existing term as a redirect.

edited 24th Jun '11 3:44:31 PM by Madrugada

I moved and merged the content. How does it look: The Ken Burns Effect; Pan and Scan.

Looks good.

And I've renamed to Ken Burns Pan. I think we're done.

Locking it up, then.