"Speed" Instead Of Distance

[HaroldB]

Igor,

Sometimes, I like to use pan and zoom to give the presentation a kinetic feel. When doing that, it is often important to keep the "speed" (for lack of a better word) of the zoom pretty much constant from slide to slide for a series of slides.

Today, the only way I know how to do that is by trial and error, or by using numeric computations based on the zoom numbers, which can be pretty tedious.

So it occurred to me that PTE is running on a computer, and why couldn't I ask PTE to do it for me?

This is my dream, and I am going to use words to express it that might not make much sense to you, since you know much more about video than I do. But I am going to try <s>.

Suppose I want to do a sequence with the "camera" slowly moving "forward" at a constant pace ("speed"). As it does that, I want to fade or cut from one picture to the next. So what I want to do, when looking at two keypoints, is set the size and place of the picture for one of them, and then tell PTE how "fast" I want to zoom in ("move forward"). Then I want PTE to calculate the size and place of the picture on the next keypoint that will generate that "speed". I also want it to keep the speed number around so I can change it a bit (make it faster or slower) and recalculate the specs for the next keypoint. When I move a keypoint, I am certainly willing to press a button to recalculate, although if you have hot-linked the two keypoints together, and it happens automatically, that would be great.

Zoom seems like it might be somewhat straightforward, since I can zoom in and out. But I think this might also be a good idea for pans, and it seems to me that for pans, I would have to give a direction in addition to speed.

To generalize this, and allow both zooms and pans to happen at the same time at a constant "speed", it seems like I want to give PTE a "direction" in some kind of "3D way" that tells it how I want to move, and then also specify how fast, and let it figure out where I will end up on the next keypoint.

I've not given this much detail implementation thought, since I have no idea whether something like this might be at all possible. But I'd love to have the ability to do this kind of presentation with less tedium than it would take to do it now.

H