Re: Help Please

Maverick wrote on 5/22/2005, 5:55 AM

Hi

I hope I can explain my problem so you can perhaps offer some help.

I am attempting to use track motion to move several events acroos the screen one after another. By this I mean that each event will only take up half the width of the screen using Pan/Crop. I then use Track Motion to move this across the screen from left to right.

The first event moves from off-screen left across to off-screen right a do the following events. When the first event's left most edge is about to appear I then have the next event start to move. I have aa small black border so that this is constantly the same between the evnts as they move accroos. I have set the keyframe smoothness to 100% and Type to Linear.

The timings all all events to move across the screen are set to the same but what happens is that they appear to move at differing speeds so that I do not get the effect I require.

The effect I am trying to acheive is simlar to the opening Credits of the 80's series Dallas if anyone knows this.

Is there any advice on what I could be doing wrong or pointers to some help.

Cheers

Comments

rextilleon wrote on 5/22/2005, 6:17 AM

Have you tried a Ram Preview on them---? If all the variables are the same (key frames, length of event etc) then perhaps its just a preview issue.

Maverick wrote on 5/22/2005, 6:19 AM

I have tried a Selective Pre-render with the same results

Randy Brown wrote on 5/22/2005, 6:42 AM

FWIW, I've dealt with an issue similar to this where I wanted the movement a constant speed, and using smoothness kept it from doing so (enters in slow, speeds up, and then exits slow. Just for the heck of it you might want to try to turn smoothness off on all clips to see what happens.
Randy

Maverick wrote on 5/22/2005, 7:31 AM

Thanks Randy. That appeared to work OK except that I had to set Smoothness to zero on the final keyframe too.

Strange. Can anyone shed some light as to why this has to be done to give me a slightly better understanding regarding smoothness.

I assumed that as soon as you set to Linear with 100% smoothness the speed of the movemnet would be contant.

Cheers all.

rs170a wrote on 5/22/2005, 8:39 AM

If you set smoothness to 0% on the very first keyframe, all subsequent keyframes (for the same event) will be 0% as well.
As far as smoothness is concerned, think of how a car comes up to speed. It's not instant. Instead, it comes up to speed gradually and slows down gradually. This would be equal to smoothness set to 100%. If a car could get up to speed instantly and stop instantly, this would be smoothness set to 0%.
In electronics terms, smoothness at 100% is a sine wave and smoothness at 0% is a square wave. HTH.

Mike

Maverick wrote on 5/22/2005, 9:04 AM

Great Mike. The sIne Wave Square wave analogy was really helpful - I think I understand how to use it now;-)

Cheers