Zoom and Pan Photos
 

What is the best program to make moves on photos, Premiere Pro or Photoshop, or what?
If Photoshop, then how do you do it?

There are many specialized programs and plug-ins out there just for zooming and panning in photo montages, but it is also easy enough in Premiere. Start out with a still image that is larger than the video frame, to maintain quality. If you start at 720x480 (SD image), then zoom in, it will pixelate - you need the extra pixels.

How big should still be then? Depends how far you need to zoom in. If image is too large, it may slow rendering or bog system when using a lot of images. 2x is a good start, so around 1500 pixels will give you room to play. If zooming in a lot, like picking a face out of a crowd, then higher resolution stills will benefit more.

Just make sure when you have your still on the timeline that "scale to frame" is NOT checked (right-click clip to see). You need to start at maximum resolution. Use the "Adobe Motion" effect to animate. Use keyframes for Scale and Position.

Some high-res images with "too much detail" will shimmer or flicker when scaled. In Photoshop, just add 0.2 of Gaussian Blur, works wonders for smooth moves in Premiere.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

I've done a number of these going back donkey's years with mixed results. Shimmering edge details were the recurring problem on panning and zooming. Applying a blur to the images can help mitigate the problem but at the expense of the overall image clarity.

Flash forward to this fall and a historical documentary I did that used a lot of very high quality black and white images. Knowing of this "shimmering" issue and being a bit smarter now I wondered if rendering it out progressive instead of interlaced would reduce the problem. It actually eliminated the shimmering completely.

Now, I have a problem with this as a solution as the doco was composed of four sections, each rendered out separately as four separate titles on disk. Two were rendered progressive and the other two, being mostly live action but including stills were rendered interlaced. None of the four sections have any shimmering on the stills. This makes me question whether progressive versus interlaced is the best option.

Also, what I don't know about how DVDs work would be bigger than, oh... the health care bill, so there could be other variables at play here like if one title is progressive does the authoring software treat them all that way? I don't know.

You might want to do some tests rendering to DVD to see which works best for you.

You can do it in PPro but it will be awfully slow.

If you can drop a few hundred $$ on this project, purchase Imaginate from Canopus - by far the fastest software I tried, and pin-sharp resulting video in lots of formats as needed.

http://desktop.grassvalley.com/produ...nate/index.php

corel video studio pro is realy a walk in the park for zooming and panning + some other things. 2 mouse clicks.

Video-editing software ? Corel VideoStudio Pro X2

many predefined + easy to make custom path for pan and zoom