Comments

ritsmer wrote on 8/3/2007, 12:39 AM
You can use Pan/Crop (click the little rectangle to the right in the still on the timeline) and then chose a suitable preset (i.e. 16:9) or make and save your own preset.
If you do this on the first still you can even copy it (right click and copy) and then select the rest of the clips on the timeline and right click the selection and click "Paste Event Attributes" - this will paste the chosen crop to all theese stills.

Pans and zooms are also done with Pan/crop.

In the left icon pane of Pan/crop just note the 2 buttons "Loch Aspect Ratio" and "Size about Center" and do a little experiments with them to see how they work.

I have done several "Stills-Videos" myself and try not to make them too fancy with too much and too fast Pan/Zoom movements - like in most modern Music-videos :-)

Sometimes you may also get a good effect from syncronizing the changes in the stills to the background music.
Giisty wrote on 8/3/2007, 1:05 PM
I recently did a stills video. Good to have some actual 'still' bits in there. I foulnd I was using too much pan/crop.

You can also use track motion to move the stills around.

There was also a post on here recently about moving four photos around at the same time which may be worth a read.
womanmarine wrote on 8/14/2007, 7:45 PM
I get rid of the black bars by putting all my stills over a motion background. It could even be just a still, either way, no black bars no matter how far I zoom out.

Just an idea, I hated the black bars!!
mickbadal wrote on 8/15/2007, 8:06 AM
Some pictures' aspect ratio doesn't match the screen's, hence the black bars. I think if you select "Pan/Crop" and then set "Maintain aspect ratio" to "No" and "Stretch to fill frame" to "Yes", it should expand the picture to fill the screen and thus the black bars will disappear (though your still may appear with some distortion, depending on the original aspect ratio).
ritsmer wrote on 8/15/2007, 9:06 AM
Yes - or just crop them - so that uncle Donald does not look even fatter :-).
There are some useful presets like "16:9 Widescreen" or you can make your own.
This cropping is even one of the things that you can copy from one still to one or many others using the Copy and Paste Event Attributes function.
A following adjustment of the copied cropping may even -kind of-improve the perspective in the pictures.
Paul Mead wrote on 8/21/2007, 7:31 PM
Something I like to do when I don't want to crop an image is use a portion of the still as a "background". That is, I drop the photo on two tracks, and in the child track I zoom in on some part of the picture that would make a good, natural backdrop, say a repeating pattern, sky, uniform, whatever. Then I add some blur to take it out of focus. In addition, I may put a soft border around the parent (main) photo to help it blend into the background photo. Sometimes I even pan across the background to give it some motion.

You end up with no black bars; you get the whole image, and the area that would be black bars "matches" the main image.
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 8/21/2007, 9:59 PM
There's an interesting tutorial about this right here on this site!
Follow this link to discover it:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/support/trainingvids.asp?prod=vegas5
MSmart wrote on 8/22/2007, 7:43 AM
Good link Ivan. Clickable Link.

How to make clickable links