New User - Pan and Zoom problem

GrenadaV wrote on 1/14/2006, 12:53 PM
Hi all,
I am having a problem setting up a pan and zoom, using a still image.

OK, Here is what I want to achieve...
Pan across the top portion of the image, say a windows title bar and tool bar, from left to right, then once reaching the right side, zoom out to show the full image.

Now, here is what I am getting, I can pan across from left to right, no problem at all, infact I am really impressed with the smooth results :), I replay that and it works fine.

It is not until I zoom out to show the full image that the problems start.. when adding the zoom out (from the right corner) to show the full image, it seeems to rise above the image (so you see black background) a little first then zooms out.

When combining this with the pan across, it makes the pan across rise above the image and then back down....

Is this making sense? and can someone help point out where I am going wrong?

cheers anad thanks in advance
Kind regards
Rossco

Comments

busterkeaton wrote on 1/14/2006, 1:02 PM
Try using track motion for this sort of thing. You often want to use a combo of track motion and pan/crop.

Also check your keyframes as you are doing this. If it shows black it means you moved your image too far offscreen
Phil_A wrote on 1/14/2006, 1:17 PM
It is the impressive smoothness that is causing your problem. You can either relocate/resize your crops to allow a margin or:
In the Pan/Crop box (on the left) reduce the smoothness.
johnmeyer wrote on 1/14/2006, 1:22 PM
This is a known problem with Vegas. If you combine pan and zoom, Vegas does not easily allow you to manage the motion of the center of the picture. What is happening is that the picture gets bigger (zoom) before the pan moves it down far enough.

What to do? Grab hold of the little circle in the center of the pan/crop rectangle and move it away from the edge where the black edge is showing. You may have to do this for most of your keyframes.

Vegas used to have a nice path that displayed right on the pan/crop dialog so you could see where each keyframe was going, over time. It inexplicably got removed in Vegas 5, apparently never to return.

BTW, I would advise against ever using track motion to do still picture pans if you are zooming into the picture. The reason is that track motion operates on the still picture AFTER it has been sampled down to project resolution (720x480 for NTSC DV video). Thus, even it you have a gorgeous 3200x2400 still photo, if you zoom into it, using track motion, to a 2x zoom, you will end up with a 360x240 pixelated mess. If instead you use the event pan/crop, the picture will be sampled from the 1600x1200 pixels that remain after the 2x zoom and THAT set of pixels will be down-sampled to 720x480. The difference is, as you might imagine, not subtle at all.

[Edit] The smoothness control is not the problem here either, although you definitely should experiment with that to see what it does. Also, right click on each keyframe and note that you can change the speed of the transition at each keyframe. Smoothness works on the spatial smoothness (arcs vs. abrupt angular changes), and the other control modifies the movement over time. Unfortunately, the controls provide absolutely no visual cues as to what your modifications are actually doing, so to get professional results you have to spend a LOT of time trying one thing and then previewing. If you have other effects assigned to that event, and therefore have to do a RAM preview to get a smooth preview, the whole process can be quite time consuming.

Hope that helps!!

GrenadaV wrote on 1/14/2006, 1:52 PM
Hi all and thanks for your help, Johnmeyer hit the nail on the head...moved the middle circle on each keyframe to be in the centre of the image all the way and all works brilliantly now...
...makes a lot of sense now, but not clear in the manual! (manuals, what are they anyway ;))

Motion smoothness did not seem to make any change and the motion track option definately made a mess of the image, but learnt some new stuff while trying these options out...

thanks all for your replies :)

much happier Rossco from Down Under :)
ansorgj wrote on 8/17/2006, 7:51 AM
>> ...moved the middle circle on each keyframe to be in the centre of the image all the way and all works brilliantly now...

Yes, thanks for that! Should be included in the documentation

Now one question remains: is it somehow possible to zoom out all the way to make the image disappear?

Seems like I can get it only to about 20% of the full frame

Jens
johnmeyer wrote on 8/17/2006, 10:18 AM
Glad I could help. Use track motion in addition to pan/crop in order to zoom further out.
Chienworks wrote on 8/17/2006, 10:52 AM
Jens, no, you can't do this with Pan/Crop as there is a maximum frame size you can specify. To get it to disappear completely you'd have to specify essentially an infinte frame size.

Use Track Motion for this, which lets you specify an image size of zero.