If the scans are very large, VMS may just have trouble keeping up. By the time the photo is brought into memory and zoomed and rescaled, its time to move on to the next photo. Especially if you have a bunch of these on the timeline.

Anytime you have jerky or laggy previewing, try running the "Selective Prerender" tool. Drag a selection area that includes your photo, or a couple of them, then click on "Tools" >> "Selectively Prerender". VMS will go through your selection area and render to a temporary file. Then, play your project from the timeline just like you would any other time. When it gets to the section you pre-rendered, you should get a very smooth preview. This will give you some idea what your final result should be like.

Note that if you make any change to your event -- change a keyframe, add an effect, etc., the pre-rendered temporary file will be obsolete and therefore will be discarded by VMS, and you will have to do the Selective Prerender again.

Tim L

Thanks for your quick response. One of my photos is 669 X 471 pixels....292 KB (although the "photo properties also shows 945 KB).

I tried your suggestions and prerendered a single photo and also two photos....and I got the same results as before.....although the prerendering process went through it's process.
I did notice one difference in one of the photos....it recognized TWO keyframes instead of one, but it "jumped" to the zoomed area and there was no smooth panning to the second keyframe. In this case..the full photo (with all the people) appeared as a blank (black) screen.
-------------------------------------------------
I just tried it again....this time, I clicked on "lock aspect ratio" ( I don't know if this resulted in changes. I noticed that when I prereder...it pre- renders it as" Movie for windows (*.avi). This time, it took me to Windows Movie Video and it zoomed and panned perfectly. BUT...when I try to preview it in VMS, all I get is a black, (blank) screen. ????????????

Thanks again for any help you can provide.

lcdrdan

One of my photos is 669 X 471 pixels....292 KB (although the "photo properties also shows 945 KB).

That photo is very reasonably sized for use with VMS, so I don't think that's the problem. What I was talking about is more of an issue if you have photos or scans that are 4 or 5 megapixels.

The 292KB is probably the filesize of your jpeg. 945KB is probably the uncompressed size -- 669x471 pixels, x 3 bytes (8-bits each for red, green, blue).

Lock Aspect Ratio in the pan/crop window simply retains the current shape of the cropping frame (4:3, 16:9, etc) as you resize it. You can turn it off to crop a section of your video as a tall rectangle, for example. (Like in the "24" thread elsewhere on this forum.)

I'm not sure what to recommend on your preview. If you single-step through the photo on your timeline, using the arrow keys, does it behave like you expect? Is it only when previewing "real time" that you get the puzzling behavior?

Tim L

FIRST OF ALL.... I want to apologize for taking up your time, for a very stupid mistake that I made. I forgot to take the BASIC STEPS to start a new project and select NTSC DV as a template. (I just inserted photos and started to crop and zoom.). Now that I followed the basic rules, everything works fine. However, your comments forced me to review other tools that will help me with other projects.Thanks again for all your help and believe me, I'm sorry for "crying wolf" when there was no wolf.

lcdrdan

hmmmmm..... now you've got us all curious.

Can you share with us what you did wrong, so that somebody else might avoid doing the same thing?

Tim L

I started a new project just by immediately adding photos to the video track I DID NOT FOLLOW THE PROCESS FOR STARTING A NEW PROJECT....
1. Click on "Project Properties"
2. Select "Video"
3. Select "NTSC DV (720x480, 29.970 fps)
THEN....I added media (photos) to he "Project Media Window" and dragged photos to the video track.

In other words, I neglected to do steps 1,2,3 above and just started adding photos to the video track. By doing this I had some wierd results
Photos in the video track appeared as a verticle line that had to be stretched.
Pan & Crop would not work properly (would not accept all keyframes).
The Preview window would be black (blank) for most of the event.

I hope this helps explain what I did wrong. I just need to remember to start a new project properly by following steps 1,2,3 above.

Thanks again for all you help and your quick response.

lcdrdan

Vegas defaults to using all those settings on all new projects unless you've changed it. You can check the box that says "use these settings on all new projects" to tell Vegas to remember them.

Also, there's no need to set the video properties individually. Simply pick the NTSC DV template from the list and that takes care of everything.