How to put stills on the video timeline with full scaling

peterh337 wrote on 6/20/2017, 10:53 AM

This is hard to describe without shooting a video of the problem...

I can import/media a jpeg file. Then I can drag it onto a video track and (if the track is higher than the main video track(s) it overlays the video. All as it should be.

The problem is that I can't find a way to make it fill the frame. I am rendering to 1080P so I even tried pre-sizing the jpeg to be 1080 pixels vertically. But the control for scaling is impenetrable. I can easily zoom and pan the image with the controls provided but there is a mysterious crop effect which I can't make go away.

As a result I just can't make the image span the entire video frame.

I am sure I am doing something stupid...

Is there some tutorial on how it works? I believe the control is called Track Motion. It means I have to create a new track for each image and it would be nicer to not to have to do that and have a control for each individual image, with perhaps just one video track for all the images.

Vegas Pro 13 or 14.

Comments

peterh337 wrote on 6/20/2017, 12:11 PM

Many thanks.

I have just tried to reproduce it, to get some screenshots.

If I import an exact-size (1920x1080) jpeg and drop it onto the timeline, that fills the frame OK.

If I import a bigger one I get this (and you can see the size of the image there)

http://peter-ftp.co.uk/screenshots/2017-06-20_180417.jpg

and no matter what I do I cannot expand the image past the left and right margins shown by the arrows. I can zoom and pan it e.g.

http://peter-ftp.co.uk/screenshots/2017-06-20_180555.jpg

but can never make the image go up to the left and right sides of the frame.

I can remove those L and R boundaries if I set Maintain Aspect Ratio to NO but that just stretches the image (4:3 I think originally) and it looks wrong.

What I want is to be able to import some image and just pan and zoom it to get the required bit of it to fill the frame, without it getting cropped.

john_dennis wrote on 6/20/2017, 12:38 PM

Your Preview is set to 16x9 aspect ratio. Avail yourself of the 16x9 aspect ratio in the Pan/Crop window.

peterh337 wrote on 6/20/2017, 12:54 PM

That restores the aspect ratio of the image but it doesn't shift the L and R margins

http://peter-ftp.co.uk/screenshots/2017-06-20_185341.jpg

fr0sty wrote on 6/20/2017, 1:50 PM

that mysterious crop effect you mention sounds like what happens when you try to zoom an image in using the video event pan crop vs. using the track motion. try using track motion to do it instead.

peterh337 wrote on 6/20/2017, 1:56 PM

Cornico - you were right. On a fresh video track and setting 16:9 before importing anything, it works
http://peter-ftp.co.uk/screenshots/2017-06-20_195403.jpg

Fr0sty - the problem with using track motion to scale/pan images is that I then need a new video track for each still image.

Thank you all - this has been brilliantly useful :)