Smooth pans

[Peter S]

Hello everyone,

It's quite some time since I have posted here or done much with PTE, apart from a bit of testing on the Mac beta, so please excuse me if I should know the answer to this!

I want to slowly pan around the coast of the UK covering a famous long distance walk known as the South West Coast Path. It is 630 miles (1014 km). I have taken screen shots from Google Earth at 30 mile altitude and stitched them together to make one large map. It is possible to see the names of larger towns and some roads at this size. The file is 7417 KB and it is 10196 px wide by 6292 high. It looks quite good on screen at a zoom of 800. It is a shame that the images are not consistent with regard to colour matching of the terrain but I can live with that. I guess the pictures are taken under differing weather conditions.

My problem is getting a continuous pan around the coast to look smooth without jerky changes between the horizontal pans moving east/west and the vertical pans moving north/south.

Can anyone please advise me as to the best way to achieve this?

I will eventually add a mask to indicate the route that the walk actually takes and hopefully recent posts I have read on this topic will make this reasonably plain sailing.

Kind regards

Peter

[fh1805]

I will eventually add a mask to indicate the route that the walk actually takes...

Peter,

If by the above you mean using Lin's technique of erasing the line of the route on an overlaid image and placing a coloured image between, then you do not need to move your "image" in a complicated manner. Your "red line" (or whatever) will do all the complicated manouevering. All you need to do is a series of straight line pans to keep the essential part of the image within your overall frame. Perhaps adding a short pause at each directional change of the main image will help achieve an illusion of smoothness if you allow the "red line" to keep moving during the pause. The audience's eye will tend to follow the red line and they will be less aware of the base image's motion.

regards,

Peter

[Lin Evans]

Hi Peter,

First, the method which Peter (the other Peter - LOL) mentioned in his reply would definitely be the way to do this rather than with masks (though you may want to use masks at certain points along the route). That method, using two files with the top one cut out, was first done by theDom and then I did a map example and wrote a tutorial on how to do it in an AVI file which you can find on the Tutorials and Articles section of the forum under the "PTE for Smarties" Pte made Easy heading at the top among the "pinned" articles and tutorials.

Second, if you really don't need the "full" map size because your route only uses a part, then the following may help greatly.

My suggestion would be to first greatly reduce the overall file size by first making a much smaller version for those slides where you want to show the entire map as an overview, then crop out only that portion which you will be using for your actual route (the 800 percent zoom) and this will effectively make your PNG file much more palatable to your graphics card. The smaller the overall PNG file, the less loading on the system and the smoother it will run.

Best regards.

Lin

[davegee]

Further to Peter's good advice, if you add a "dot" along the way wherever a town or feature arises and also where you change direction the "bump" is less evident.

I have created an ultra smooth transition in place of the "smooth" version supplied by Igor which accelerates for 50% of the time and decelerates during the remaining 50%. That also might help?

DaveG

[Peter S]

Hi Peter, Dave

Thanks for your advice. I was actually hoping to show an overview panning round the coast at the start without showing the moving line or anything else but this may just not be possible. If this is the case your solution may be the only workable one.

Lin did you mean to post a reply???

Peter

[Lin Evans]

Hi Peter,

It's quite easy to do what you intend actually, it just requires using more than one slide. Use the first slide to do your pan around, etc., then copy that slide for the start of the second slide where you do the actual map. Just use the same zoom, pan and rotate values for the start of the second slide as for the end of the first and use "Quick, no transition" for the transition between the two. As long as the second slide is sized and positioned the same there will be no perceptible change when the second slide is displayed, but there will be a big break for the graphics system on the computer.

Best regards,

Lin

[thedom]

My problem is getting a continuous pan around the coast to look smooth without jerky changes between the horizontal pans moving east/west and the vertical pans moving north/south.

Peter, I think I might have a simple solution.

But I need to test it before explaining it to you.

I will post my conclusions tonight (in about 5 hours).

UPDATE : please send me your map to thefreedom69 @ free.fr

Thanks.

[xahu34]

...My problem is getting a continuous pan around the coast to look smooth without jerky changes between the horizontal pans moving east/west and the vertical pans moving north/south...

Peter,

This is a general problem with PTE. If you concatenate pans (while changing the direction) you will never obtain a smooth curve (as offered by some competitors), there will be a sharp bend. A possible workaround could be obtained using hierarchical modeling (parent-child relationships). The object to be moved may have a father and a grandfather, one responsible for the north/south pan, the other one for the east/west pan

Regards,

Xaver