How do I crop an image/clip AND also adjust its position (pan) simultaneously?

[Mike Kujbida]

[gary orish] “Hi, I’m afraid I find the pan/crop tool cumbersome and counter-intuitive to use. One has to INCREASE the frame handles in order to DECREASE the size of the image, for instance.”

Think of Pan/Crop as being a camera, i.e. zooming in (making the image bigger) or zooming out (making the image smaller) on the screen.

“Right now, I’m trying to move a video image off to one side, and crop the edges.”

Use Pan/Crop to crop and then Track Motion to move it to the desired location.

“I also noticed that sometimes the handles (and dotted lines) disappear from view and the position panel is grayed out. The only way to get them back is either to delete the clip and start again with a new pan/crop FX, or to keep undoing what I did until the position handles are back in view. (Is there any way of managing this directly, in the View menu perhaps?)”

Use your mouse wheel to zoom out on everything or enter a very low value in the Zoom (%) box option under Workspace. FYI, it only goes down to 12.5 %.

[Gary Orish]

Hi and thanks for the swift response.

I’m afraid your suggestion doesn’t work. I can zoom in/out to change the size of the image with the pan/crop effect. OR I can crop one or more of the sides of the image (or video). But I can’t do both, I have to choose either one or the other.

I think what I’m looking for is a pan effect and a crop effect, separate from each other. I’m not quite sure why Sony combined them into a single effect – unless there is a way to do both cropping and panning [zooming] in the controls somehow.

When I tried your solution, the image was cropped (great!) but then the ENTIRE TRACK was panned off to the side (and was hidden from view). I tried moving the clip to a different track, but then it was still hidden – so maybe a kind of transparency mask might work. It’s also not feasible to create an entire new track just for one clip – and I have hundreds of clips that need to be cropped and moved into the correct position on top of an existing image.

What I managed to do as a work around was to use a graphics editor to crop an image, or a separate instance of vegas to crop and then render a video clip – and then I imported the image (or clip) back into vegas and applied the pan effect. Long-winded, but it works. If you have a more immediate or elegant solution then please let me know.

BTW, I also tried to max zoom out approach to make the edit-handles visible, but there was still nothing. I can’t reproduce this issue now, so when it happens again I’ll post a separate question to deal with it.

Many thanks,
Gary

[Norman Black]

[gary orish] “When I tried your solution, the image was cropped (great!) but then the ENTIRE TRACK was panned off to the side (and was hidden from view)”

Of course. Reset the track motion at the end of the event so the next event is default or whatever you want to do with the next event.

Since you want to crop into an event AND then move it around the screen you have no choice but to use pan/crop AND track motion in combination.

If all you wanted to do was move the whole event around the screen you can do that with just pan/crop or even track motion, whichever you prefer.