Ken Burns Effect from a Photo

Animate a photo with a Ken Burns move

Pick a single still image, choose the motion, how long the clip runs and the output size, and get back a short MP4 that slowly pans and zooms across the picture — the classic "Ken Burns" documentary look. Everything runs with ffmpeg inside your browser tab: nothing is uploaded, and the tool is free.

Under the hood the photo is scaled to cover the output frame at a 2× supersample (which keeps the movement smooth instead of stair-stepping), then ffmpeg's zoompan filter walks a straight-line path across it — pushing in, pulling back, or gliding sideways — and encodes the frames to H.264 (libx264, yuv420p, +faststart) so the clip plays everywhere.

Motion, length and size

• Motion — the move applied to the photo:
  • Zoom in (default) — starts on the whole photo and pushes slowly toward the center.
  • Zoom out — starts tight and pulls back to reveal the full photo.
  • Pan left / right / up / down — holds the zoom and glides the frame across the picture in that direction.
• Duration (1–30 s) — how long the clip runs. The default is 5 s.
• Zoom amount (1.0–2.0) — how far the move travels. 1.3 (default) is a gentle, natural push; 1.6+ is dramatic. Panning needs a value above 1.0 so there is off-screen room to slide into — at exactly 1.0 a pan has nowhere to move.
• Width / Height — the output size in pixels (default 1280 × 720). Odd numbers are snapped down to even (H.264 requires it). Use a tall size like 1080 × 1920 for vertical social stories.
• Frames per second (1–60) — smoothness of the motion, default 30.

Worked example

You have beach.jpg, a wide landscape photo. Load it, leave Motion on Zoom in, set Duration to 7 and Zoom amount to 1.3. You get beach-kenburns.mp4 — a 7-second 1280 × 720 clip that eases from the full frame into a gentle close-up. Want the opposite reveal? Switch Motion to Zoom out. Making a vertical reel? Set Width 1080 and Height 1920. The page URL /tools/video-ken-burns/?direction=zoom-out&duration=5&zoom=1.5&width=1280&height=720 deep-links to a pre-filled zoom-out reveal.

Notes and limits

• This animates one still image per clip — it is not a slideshow builder and does not stitch multiple photos or add music.
• The move is a single straight-line pan/zoom for the whole clip; there are no keyframes, easing curves or mid-clip direction changes.
• A pan at zoom 1.0 can't move (no off-screen room) — raise the zoom, or the clip will look static.
• The photo is resampled to your chosen size, so a small source stretched to a large output will look soft; start from an image at least as large as the output.
• Input is capped at 12 MB and the output clip at 32 MB; both are processed in your browser's memory.

FAQ