The "pan & crop" is the single one thing that makes the videos work... I get the comment the most from my family. Mother-in-law says, "that makes those photos come alive".

It's not a MS trick, and my videos aren't great, but I keep them short and they get watched more than once!

Ian G.

Newbie here, so what is "pan & corp" on a still picture actually do visually?

It allows you to zoom in and / or out of a picture, you can pan across it or, if you've zoomed out so far that the picture's smaller than the screen, you can "fly" it across the screen. You can pan and zoom simultaneously and, of course, you can do this on all 3 video tracks at the same time. Bottom line is that it makes the picture more dynamic.

Ian G.

The effect IanG is describing is often called the "Ken Burns Effect" as he was the first to use it. Apparently.

Along the lines of ChristerTX's slow-mo, you can always get an "awww" if you use slow mo with kids and add a sappy music from your favorite movie.

I use this method to Freeze action then draw a circle around an object.
Put your clip on the timeline - eg: a skier.
Put your cursor at the point where you want to freeze then capture a stil from the preview window.
ISplit the clip at this point - then insert the still between the split clips - extend it to the time length you need.
On the second video track put a circle from the effects (I forget the exact name) and Pan and Crop it to th size you need- eg: around 1 person, make it a bit shorter (time length) than the still.
On the same track put a clock wipe at he start and end of the circle.
What should happen on playback is the video will freeze frame and a circle will be drawn around your object , then it will "undraw and the video will continue.

Thanks shmulb! I will give that one a try.

question for shmulb...

In your circle technique are you able to draw a circle around an object, say in the upper right corner of the frame? When I do this the circle is "drawn" and "erased" as if there are two pencils/erasers starting from a common point then moving in the opposite direction. Clearly this is because the clock wipe is centered in the frame. This would not be a problem if the center of the clock wipe is in the interior of the circle. Are you able to position the center of the clockwipe at will? Or would this require a render out to .AVI at full size then put the rendered circle in the upper video track with transparency and pan and crop that?

If it must be rendered, I suppose the could be done once and then reused.

Yes you are correct - I guess I never tried it on a corner. I could not find a way to move the center of the wipe.

Yes, I tried that trick on my project and the wipe is always centered.
So you would have to output to a AVI then pan and crop.

My favourite trick is actually to have a image, split horizontally with 3 rows, slow transist to black for the top and bottom until it looks like a pan and crop but it isn't as the picture's width is kept and move the image exiting left or right.
Always have people asking me how it is done on VSM.

Cheers

OK -so tell us Please !