Zoom Automation?
 

I have been going through help materials and I can't quite find what I am looking for but I have a feeling it has to do with video effect automation. Here is what I want to do:

- Consider a video in which I am holding a guitar speaking to the camera. I say something along the lines of "And now let me show you how to play that". I am only recording with one camera (non ideal, I know). What I want to do is have the video be digitally zoomed at points where I am playing something. It won't be a crazy zoom. Just enough to get my head out of the picture and focus on the guitar's neck and body.

Anyway, I want to be able to select a range of frames. The first frame will have no zoom. The last frame will be zoomed into the region of the frame I specify. Then I want to be able to have the zoom be gradually applied (based on a linear or non linear ramp).

Can anyone recommend an efficient way to do stuff like that?

And yes I know all about digital zoom and what it implies (have taken graduate courses on digital signal processing...).

thanks,

brian

Ok - now I see this covered in the help file...

Messed around with the Zoom transition, but that isn't exactly what I need. I really need to specify the frame region that is the target zoom. Then I need to be able to keep that zoom held and then remove it, returning back to full view. This definitely sounds like a tricky automation task.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

thanks,

brian



Update: Ok, now I hit the jackpot: From the help:

If you want to create an animated crop or zoom, use the keyframe controller at the bottom of the Event Pan/Crop window to establish distinct zoom settings throughout the duration of the event.

During playback, intermediate frames are interpolated to create smooth motion. Expand the Keyframe interpolation heading on the left side of the window and drag the Smoothness slider to adjust the interpolation. For more information about keyframe animation, click here.



This is pretty sophisticated stuff...

Brian,

It weould seem to me that you could crop/motin and use key frames to accomplish that.

It would be easiest to have someone do that when you are filming.

Yeah, that would be much easier. For now I am just experimenting. So far I have it working pretty well, but I can't figure out how to make the pan/crop work properly when the zooming is occuring over the course of 2 events. I grouped the events but it didn't allow me to open a pan/crop editor for the grouped event. I can still only bring up event specific editors.

Any thoughts?

thanks,

brian

You have to apply the Pan/Crop separately for the two events. You can copy a keyframe in one and paste that keyframe in the other to get the exact same pan/crop settings.

The problem is, if you have a keyframe towards the end of one event and another one towards the beginning of the next event, you can't have a zoom be linearly (or otherwise) applied between them. I tried it and as soon as one event is over, the next event has no knowledge of what its predecessor was doing. Faily small issue, but an issue nonetheless. I could be wrong though since this is my second day using the software!

thanks,

brian

How about rendering them to a single event and keyframing that?

Well... they are TWO SEPARATE EVENTS. Whatever you do to one isn't done to the other. You can copy the last keyframe of the first event and paste it as the first keyframe of the second event and the sizing will be identical. As for zooming rates, you'd need to manually control that.