Zoom and pan with Smooth turned on

[cjdnzl]

Hello again all,

I'm trying to get my head around zooming and panning, and my problem at the moment is with an image of a group of about 12 people. I start off with about a second of the whole frame showing, then I zoom in to the leftmost person until I have a waist shot of that person showing, than a small pause, then I pan along the row of people to the rightmost individual.

If I set this up using 'linear' zoom and pan, the motion works as expected, but when I turn on 'smooth' zooming and panning, the initial zoom to the leftmost person is ignored, and I get a simple combined zoom/pan straight to the rightmost person.

Further attempts with pan on smooth and zoom on linear gives an image which now zooms into the middle of the group and then pans with increasing speed to the end; while pan on smooth and zoom on linear produces a weird movement, the image vanishing completely off the screen to the right, then sliding back as the zoom and pan combined goes to the righthand end of the image.

The actual length of the slide duration doesn't seem to affect the image behavior.

Sorry to be so long-winded, any rational explanation will be gratefully accepted!

[Lin Evans]

Did you watch the AVI I pointed you to? The problem is happening because you are not separating the keypoints and possibly because you are not setting both zoom and pan to smooth. Don't try to use linear on pan and smooth on zoom because the results fight with each other if you don''t thoroughly understand what's happening. Set zoom, pan and rotate all to smooth. The "easy" way to do this is to set it all up as linear. When it is working correctly click on smooth for all three (PZR) then go to the second keypooint and click on it. Next go to the setup for each of Pan, Zoom and Rotate and click on each line which says "Separate". Do this for Pan, Zoom and Rotate. When you click on each line you will see the message change to "glue" and each "pair" of keypoints will show a bracket connecting them. This shows you graphically that the action between this pair of keypoints is now independent and reflects one of the non-linear motion effects. In this case, "smooth". Don't miss any, be sure you click on each one. Use the down scroll bar to be certain you have no reference left which says "separate". Once you have done this for the second keypoint the remainder of keypoints will reflect the changes and nothing more needs to be done to make the motion act like you expect.

Watch this AVI again, or for the first time if you didn't view it the last time. This shows precisely what you need to do.

http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/nonlinearavi.zip

Lin

Hello again all,

I'm trying to get my head around zooming and panning, and my problem at the moment is with an image of a group of about 12 people. I start off with about a second of the whole frame showing, then I zoom in to the leftmost person until I have a waist shot of that person showing, than a small pause, then I pan along the row of people to the rightmost individual.

If I set this up using 'linear' zoom and pan, the motion works as expected, but when I turn on 'smooth' zooming and panning, the initial zoom to the leftmost person is ignored, and I get a simple combined zoom/pan straight to the rightmost person.

Further attempts with pan on smooth and zoom on linear gives an image which now zooms into the middle of the group and then pans with increasing speed to the end; while pan on smooth and zoom on linear produces a weird movement, the image vanishing completely off the screen to the right, then sliding back as the zoom and pan combined goes to the righthand end of the image.

The actual length of the slide duration doesn't seem to affect the image behavior.

Sorry to be so long-winded, any rational explanation will be gratefully accepted!

[cjdnzl]

Thank you again, Lin. I did this time download your nonlinear video - last time my so-called broadband was managing just about 20 - 25 KB/s, and I abandoned the download as I didn't know how big it was and it was taking too long.

Having downloaded it this time, all became clear, and I was able to get the zoom/pan working properly. I have to say the procedure is not instinctive, and since all three PZR functions have to be altered to 'smooth', and then all three have to be separated, it seems obvious that a single 'shortcut' keystroke could do all of it at once, while retaining the manual setup if one needed something different.

My next task is to find out how to do multiple images at once, travelling in different directions and/or zooming as well, like the 'Creation" show done by Stephane Bidouze. That show is just fabulous.

Kind regards,

Colin

[Lin Evans]

It's not absolutely "necessary" to change all (PZR) to smooth or whatever non-linear motion you need, think of it a "insurance". The issue is that in the majority of cases when you zoom there is frequently pan involved as well. "Sometimes" there is also a bit of rotate, especially if you accidentally move the rectangle from the zero rotate status. Since there is no penalty or harm from changing a keypoint to a non-linear mode when there is "no" movement, doing so simply provides insurance that if you have accidentally envoked a pan or rotate when all you really intended was a zoom, there will be no unexpected consenquences.

I agree that it might be useful to have a "shortcut" so that when one is chosen the other could optionally be selected and actuated as well. That may happen in the future. The reason for having the necessity to separate keypoints is that in some cases it might be desirable to have a non-linear motion between two keypoints and a linear motion at another point in time. I can think of a particular example such as wanting to rotate a propeller on an airplane. Perhaps when the airplane engine is first started, the propeller may gradually accellerate in rotation. Once the engine is running then perhaps between a different set of keypoints linear motion might be desired. Having the ability to group keypoints under different non-linear or linear motion then becomes a useful option.

To have different object performing different motions just go to the Objects and Animations screen and add PNG objects. You will need to create the objects in Photoshop or other software. You can create PNG text objects quickly in in PTE to play with by exporting text as "Rasterize Text to PNG" from the "Properties" tab in the Objects and Animations screen. These can be treated just as any other object so you can get a feel for how to manipulate things.

Use care when adding objects that you do not add them unintentionally as "children" of existing objects. There are two ways to avoid this. Left click your mouse in the white area below any object in the Objects list, then right click and choose "add" image, etc. Another way is to adjust the view percentage so that there is gray area outside any bounding rectangles and right click the mouse in an area outside of any green rectangle and then choose "add" image, etc.

Once you have a second object in the objects list which is not "offset" under another object you can apply any PZR effects to that object. Each object has it's own timeline and keypoints so any PZR effects you choose will be reflected by the timeline shown when that object is "selected".

Yes, I agree, Stephane has some incredibly great slideshows and watching them can give you many ideas of how the PZR effects can be used very effectively.

Best regards,

Lin

Thank you again, Lin. I did this time download your nonlinear video - last time my so-called broadband was managing just about 20 - 25 KB/s, and I abandoned the download as I didn't know how big it was and it was taking too long.

Having downloaded it this time, all became clear, and I was able to get the zoom/pan working properly. I have to say the procedure is not instinctive, and since all three PZR functions have to be altered to 'smooth', and then all three have to be separated, it seems obvious that a single 'shortcut' keystroke could do all of it at once, while retaining the manual setup if one needed something different.

My next task is to find out how to do multiple images at once, travelling in different directions and/or zooming as well, like the 'Creation" show done by Stephane Bidouze. That show is just fabulous.

Kind regards,

Colin