Pan Crop Question for stills

Dezine wrote on 10/24/2002, 4:15 PM

Recently I was working on a montage in Pn/Crop and was using various picture sizes.
I noticed that when I used a picture that was portrait configuration, I had black bars on both sides of the picture that was still present when I tried to reduce the size of teh picture and move it as well.
Is there a way to reduce a portrait pic in Pan/Crop without getting the black borders? the picture originally had no black borders around it as it was cropped to fit?
I notice that if I am able to get around this when I use the track motion feature but I want to use Pan/Crop for this, and if I keep the maintain aspect ratio then I get the box but when I uncheck this I don't but the picture distorts.
Can someone help me out so I can keep the proper aspect ratio without having to do this manualy in Pan/Crop?
Thanks,
Dezine (Mihcael)

Comments

dcrandall wrote on 10/24/2002, 5:27 PM

You're going to need to crop to match the output aspect.
1) Select Pan/Crop on the Event
2) Right Click within the window grid and choose "Match Output Aspect" from the menu. (This will automatically crop your picture to the proper aspect ratio to remove the black borders)

PDB wrote on 10/25/2002, 5:54 AM

I have the same result when using portrait/vertical cam shots...The black borders are not generated by VV: it is simply that the pic cannot fill the screen coz of the proportions. If you rotated the pic (90º) you'll see it fits nicely - but then you have to twist your head to see it porperly. You would have to pan in a LOT to get it to fill the screen. To avoid the black bars on the side, you might try using a mask: at least then they wont be black bars...

Im not sure if my explanation is that clear but its a similar concept as trying to place a vertical A4 sheet of paper over another horizontal A4 sheet and hope that it will cover the whole surface: it can't!! In practice, VV reduces the height and width of the pic for it to be able to be seen within the framesize, generating a blank space on both sides which appears black when on screen...

Not much help, I know, but I believe that is the reality behind the issue...

If however someone esle has a technique to solve this, I would too be happy to learn about it...!!!

Cheers...

Control_Z wrote on 10/25/2002, 12:18 PM

VV3 makes it easy to simply use a background (on a lower track) instead of black. moving, if you want. I use a simple loop I found for free at [Ulead I think, can't remember now].

With Premiere you must render a virtual clip to do this (painful). Forget it entirely with MSP (no transitions on super tracks).

JohnnyRoy wrote on 10/25/2002, 9:10 PM

This was covered in another post and I’ve used it with great results. Copy the vertical image to a lower track. Then use pan/crop to make a 4:3 aspect to fill the screen. Finally add a Gaussian Blur. What you now have is a background that is blurred in the same colors as the original image (which is in the track above). The results is that the black bars are now bars that blend in with the image because it’s a burred zoom of the image itself. I used it on a recent project that had a lot of vertical stills and it looks really nice.

~jr