Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 1/12/2006, 6:15 PM
A few things that can sometimes cause this surprise:

1. Make sure you click on the pan crop for the event that is under the cursor. Sometimes you have the pan/crop dialog for a different event still showing from work you did a few minutes ago. The cursor on the timeline, however, is now over a different event, so as you change the pan/crop, nothing seems to happen.

2. Make sure you are changing the keyframe that matches the position of the cursor. With sync turned off (the little I-bar in the left side of the icons at the bottom of pan/crop), you will affect only the initial keyframe with your pan/crop moves. If you have a long event and the cursor is over a place at the end of the event, Vegas will assume that you want to continuously keyframe from whatever changes you are making to the keyframe at the start of the event, back down to no changes at the end of the event. In the extreme case, if the cursor is at the end of the event, you can move the pan/crop all over the place and see absolutely nothing happening in the preview window. The solution is to click twice on the sync control, once to turn it on to put the cursor in the pan/crop at the same place as the cursor on the timeline, and a second time to turn the damn thing off so that Vegas won't start adding keyframes you don't want every time you change things.

Sony should really split this into two controls: One to sync the cursor and another to automatically add keyframes. Syncing is good; automatically adding keyframes is bad.

Hope that helps.
Lili wrote on 1/12/2006, 10:02 PM
Thanks John - I still can't believe I did that!

Your point number one "fixed" it. Now that I have dual monitors, my pan crop window was really large and covering my video preview window ,and I wouldn't be surprised if my cursor was not even over the right event .

So - after 2 nights of "pan-crop malfunction" (more like a brain mal), I'm back in business:-)
johnmeyer wrote on 1/13/2006, 9:17 AM
I'm glad I could help. This is another usability issue that I hope Sony addresses. I've written to them about it.
GlennChan wrote on 1/13/2006, 12:55 PM
It might be slightly better to also "lock" the keyframes, so you can't accidentally move them around. And maybe grey out that area to indicate to the user that you can't change the keyframes.