How to make a photo move with real depth
Upload a photograph and say how it should feel. Vizard Agent cuts the subject out as its own layer, then moves the subject and the background at different speeds so the camera appears to travel past them. A slow zoom across a flat image never achieves that.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Describe the feeling you're after rather than the camera move you imagine. Vizard Agent derives the moves from the music's own structure, so the mood and the occasion produce a better result than a pan direction and a speed. Do ask for depth, though, or you get a Ken Burns pan.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
A slow push into a photograph always looks like a photograph. Separating the subject from the background and moving them at different rates makes the image read as a space with something standing in it. Each move is tested first, because a parallax move that drifts too far exposes the empty edge behind the cutout. In the session behind this article it:
- Found music candidates matching the mood and the tradition, detected their beats and tempo, and analysed each one's mood and emotional arc before choosing.
- Extracted a slice of the music, detected its beats precisely, found the onset peaks and measured the slice's loudness.
- Cut the subject out as its own layer for the depth parallax, viewed the cutout and checked its alpha channel.
- Tested the first shot's camera move and reviewed its start and end frames, then did the same for the second shot.
- Searched for an elegant serif typeface and rendered a shot with the text layered behind the subject.
When does this not work well?
Parallax reveals whatever was hidden behind the subject, and in a single photograph there's nothing there. Vizard Agent keeps every move within what the image can support. Big moves expose the gap, crowded or flat photos have no clear foreground to separate, hair and fine edges show at the cutout boundary, and low resolution exposes the pixels.
Common questions
How many photos do I need? One is enough. Vizard Agent builds several shots from the same image.
What makes a good photograph for this? A clear subject against a background with depth. Vizard Agent will say when an image is too flat.
Can I supply my own track? Yes. Vizard Agent detects its beats and builds the moves around them.