pan/crop

gmes29 wrote on 8/26/2006, 3:35 PM
anybody find this effect a little awkward to use especially for zooming?? it seems to me it would be so much easier/more intuitive if we could use percentages instead of actual height and width for each position/keyframe. and that porthole thing is hard to get used to too since you have do the opposite of the effect that you want. eg: if you want to make your title start zooming when your still is smaller than normal size, you have to make the surrounding porthole (the thing with the 'F' in it) bigger and vice versa.
or maybe i'm just missing something.. is there a better way to do this??

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 8/26/2006, 4:32 PM
Are you using Vegas Studio 6? If so, try Track Motion instead. It works the way you seem to want to.

Pan/Crop: the dashed rectangle represents the output frame that you position the video in.

Track Motion: the dashed rectangle represents the source frame which you position in the output frame.

Still no percentages, but you'll make the image smaller by decreasing the size of the rectangle rather than increasing it. Track Motion also allows zooming out to infinity by setting the source frame to zero size. This can't be done with Pan/Crop.
gmes29 wrote on 8/28/2006, 12:58 PM
thanx for the suggestion.. but i'll tell you TM looks even less intuitive than pan/crop. hopefully the Help will be of some because the manual sure isn't..
Tim L wrote on 8/28/2006, 5:10 PM
Hang in there gmes29! Things do get easier with time.

The pan/crop tool definitely seemed to operate "backwards" to me when I first started (which was only about a year ago), but it does become very natural. While you can do all sorts of things with it, its basic, root functionality is to "crop" an image, and to pan across an image, showing only a portion of it at a time.

Its easiest to think of working with still photos, though it works the same with video. If you were working with any photo editing program, and wanted to crop that photo so only a selected portion of the photo was retained, you would draw a frame within the photo, maybe stretch the frame bigger or smaller, etc., until the frame selected just what you wanted *within* the photo. In this sense -- actually cropping an image -- the pan/crop tool works just as we expect it to.

But, what we want to do a lot of the time is not to zoom in on a photo (or title, or video) and select just a piece of it, but rather to zoom way out so that the entire photo is shrunk down -- like a picture-in-a-picture, or having a photo or title that starts out tiny and zooms in to fill the screen. And in this application, the pan/crop logic seems backwards (because we are thinking "I want to make the photo smaller", and it seems odd the photo stays the same size and the frame instead must be made bigger.)

It does become pretty natural after awhile, but I'll admit it seemed really backwards at first.

Tim L
skinned_knee wrote on 8/28/2006, 9:04 PM
Why is it an "F" anyway? There has to be a significance to that...
Tim L wrote on 8/29/2006, 4:16 AM
Why is it an "F" anyway? There has to be a significance to that...
I don't know for sure, but probably the main reason is that "F" is not symmetric in either the vertical or horizontal direction. No matter what you do with an "F" -- upside down, rotated, mirror image, etc, -- you can recognize that it is... upside down, rotated, mirror image, whatever.

If they used "A", it would look the same if you made a mirror image left-to-right. "B" would look essentially the same if flipped top-to-bottom. Same with "C", "D", "E", etc.

"F" is probably just the first letter that works so that whatever you do with it, it is easy to recognize what you've done with it.

Now personally, I always subconsciously think of "F"rame when I see it on the screen in the pan/crop tool, but in reality that is probably mere coincidence.

Tim L
Chienworks wrote on 8/29/2006, 10:17 AM
There was a discussion about the "F" thing a couple years ago. One of the SONY programmers chimed in that F was the first non-mirror letter so that's why it was chosen. That it's also the first letter of "Frame" was a happy coincidence.