Zoom in from infinity (zero size): Pan/crop or FX?

RichMacDonald wrote on 12/1/2003, 1:46 PM
Let's say I have an event that I want to zoom into. The event will start as a single point in the picture, then expand to full size. Perhaps this is a transition; perhaps the event is just opening up over a black background.

Given my druthers, I'd use the pan/crop tool. It gives me great control, i.e., I can keyframe any number of points along the zoom. Unfortunately, its extremely cumbersome when working in the very small range: You cannot select the sizing points easily so you wind up typing sizes into the fields, and its extremely "coarse". I don't have enough zooming control in the pan/crop editor. IOW, I know *how* to use the pan/crop tool to do this, but its awkward.

(Aside: I tend to use very large stills, and I have trouble fitting the controls into the pan/crop window, i.e., the min 12.5% zoom should go lower. But that's another issue.)

Or I could find a transition that does it for me. To be honest, I generally/only use straight cuts or the simple dissolve transition, so I'm very inexperienced at this. I find all the "push/squeeze" transitions annoying. Over the weekend I played with the "spiral in" transition and couldn't figure out how to control the path or event size at all. I quit in frustration.

Can anyone suggest some transitions to look at and how to control them? Basically zooming in and out from zero size. One event zooming in while another zooms out. Any ideas appreciated.

Thinking about it, I guess the 3D LE plugin would work. You'd have to type the values into fields rather than dragging around a rectangle size, but I could live with that.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/1/2003, 3:49 PM
Are you zooming into the picture at all, or are you ending when the whole picture fills the screen? If it's the latter case then you should consider using image files that are much closer to the size of the video frame instead of "very large". This will give you much easier control over the process. For that matter you could use two versions of the image, one at 654x480 (or 786x576 for PAL) and another at the large resolution, and switch between them when you get to the 1:1 zoom point.

There isn't any good way to zoom in from zero size because you can't specify an infinite frame size in Pan/Crop. A work around would be to set the frame size as large as possible, use as small an image as possible, and then also fade in the image for the first few frames.

An alternative is to use Track Motion instead of Pan/Crop. This will let you specify a zero size for the image and works very well for the zero to full frame zoom. The downside is that Track Motion converts the image to the project frame size first before moving it so that if you continue to zoom in larger than 1:1 the picture will pixellate no matter how "very large" it is to begin with.

Of course, you could combine all these methods, using Track motion on a smaller image to zoom in from zero size to 1:1, then Pan/Crop to zoom in on a larger image past the 1:1 point.
cheroxy wrote on 12/1/2003, 3:59 PM
If find using pan/crop easy to zoom a picture in or out to infinity. If you use your mouse scroll wheel you can change the zoom on the pan/crop view quickly. That way it is easy to drag the corner of the picture to the size you want.
Chienworks wrote on 12/1/2003, 4:11 PM
Quick .veg & .mpg files illustrating the combined method i listed above:

http://vegasusers.com/testbench/files/chienworks-zerozoom.zip

Approximately 1.9MB