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creating curved pan paths in Sony Vegas Pro: BCC Pan & Zoom vs Sony Vegas’ built-in Pan & Crop?
Hi;
(I’m a relative beginner. . .)
For months, I’ve been using BCC’s Pan & Zoom within Sony Vegas Pro to create Ken Burns pans across still images. I use keyframes, but I find that creating a smooth, visual curve between keyframe points can be supremely frustrating — in fact, apart from filling the space with way too many keyframes (which ends up creating unsmooth velocities from point to point), it seems to be impossible. (To be clear, I’m not referring to the various velocity ‘curves’ — eg, slow, fast, smooth, etc — between keyframes when using BCC Pan & Zoom within Sony Vegas Pro, but actual curved paths between keyframed pan points.)
Today I discovered that Sony Vegas’ built-in Pan & Crop includes the ability to control “keyframe interpolation smoothness”, on a scale from 0 to 100; experimentation showed me that a smoothness of “100” creates a gentle curve between any two keyframe pan points, while “0” eliminates all curves, so that keyframe points are joined by straight lines.
I have found that one can use Sony Vegas Pro’s Pan & Crop to create curves between keyframe pan points, while still using BCC Pan & Zoom to apply zoom to those pans. However, I have not yet found any way of creating smooth curves between keyframe pan points when using only BCC Pan & Zoom to create pan keyframes.
Am I missing something basic? Is there a way to create smooth curves between keyframe pan points when using BCC Pan & Zoom within Sony Vegas Pro? (Am I misguided to expect more sophisticated controls within BCC FX than within Vegas itself?)
Thanks, in advance, for any feedback or tips!
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6 Replies
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Hello,
I’m never really understood the need for bcc pan and zoom in Vegas since the effect can so easily be created in Vegas. Already you have found a smooth transition between keyframes in Vegas. Now just add track motion and this may yield the desired result. True , it was challenging to create the Ken Burns effect in other NLE but Vegas seems created for the task. If you do the effect often, try looking up Ultimate S By VASST It is a collection of useful scripts that really speed up Vegas workflow.BCC Pan and Zoom has an incredible amount of controls for such a simple task. perhaps too many. There thing is that one needs to twirl down the timeline in the plugin to do custom animations. Is that what you are looking for? The animation controls in the plugin itself?
RF -
Thank-you, Russ!
>Now just add track motion and this may yield the desired result.
Thanks for the tip! I will try this.
>If you do the effect often, try looking up Ultimate S By VASST It is a collection of useful scripts that really speed up Vegas workflow.
. . . and thanks for this tip! I will look into it. Is there one VASST script/app that is specific to creating curved paths for pan keyframes?
>There thing is that one needs to twirl down the timeline in the plugin to do custom animations. Is that what you are looking for? The animation controls in the plugin itself?
Forgive me, but I’m not sure what you mean by “twirl down the timeline”. When using BCC Pan & Zoom, I do use the BCC controls that are available in the Vegas “video event fx” window, and, yes, there are many controls! I tend to avoid the automated pans, and use “Transform A” to do manual keyframes, using the ‘position’, ‘anchor’, ‘scale’, and — occasionally – 3D controls, but none of the ‘cropping’, ‘motion blur’, etc., controls. However, none of the controls seem to address creating curved pan paths. As well, I suspect that BCC’s intense controls may be causing the huge slowdowns when playing back in the Vegas Video Preview window and when rendering.
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Hello again,
Q: Is there one VASST script/app that is specific to creating curved paths for pan keyframes?
A: No there are no VASST script/app that is specific to creating curved paths for pan keyframes. There are however scripts / modules specifically designed to generate the Ken Burns effect with just a few mouse clicks. I must disclose that I ventured to VASST.com to verify and have not found where you can purchase a licence save for a reference to a link ay sonycreativesoftware which I did not follow.
Q: Forgive me, but I’m not sure what you mean by “twirl down the timeline”.
A: Twirl down is a term that I myself did not understand. I do not know if you are aware of the sideways triangle within a circle icon that BCC uses to indicate a dropdown menu. Click on this icon is twirling down.Placing the mouse cursor, hovering, over one of these Icons a tooltip saying animation will pop up and if clicked on a timeline will appear at the bottom of the plugin. Here control over the slider can be exercised. At the very bottom of the plugin lower right side are two buttons. You may need to drag the plugin up to see it. One button says lane and to the right the button says curves. The curves will give you very precise control over the animation for that slider. Multiple sliders can be opened in the timeline viewing and editing of all sliders used to create the animation.
I hope I explained that well enough, if not, please let me know.
RF -
Thanks, again, for taking the time to respond, Russ – I appreciate it!
>Click on this icon is twirling down. . .
Aha — yes, I do this all the time, so that I can create keyframes for panning and zooming, using BCC Pan & Zoom.
>One button says lane and to the right the button says curves. The curves will give you very precise control over the animation for that slider.
I have found that those “curves” apply to the velocities of the pans (eg, “smooth”, “fast”, “slow”, “hold”, etc), not to actual curves in the pans from keyframe to keyframe. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) So far, only Vegas’ “keyframe interpolation smoothness” — found in Vegas’ own Pan & Crop feature — seems to be able to create any kind of curve between panning keyframes.
Thanks for looking into VASST for me, Russ!
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Hello again,
Please review this video, it may give some insight to the workings of the plugin. If the explanayion is way off base let me know.RF
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