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Key Frames- Trouble Cropping, Moving, Zooming, and Panning a video simultaneously
I’m currently working on an edit that includes two videos. One video is a map that has a blue dot moving along city streets. The second is a gopro video of someone biking the same route as the blue dot on the map.
I’m trying to take the map video from 100% size in the first 10 seconds and do the following: crop it so that the video becomes a small square, move the video from the center of the frame to the bottom right hand corner, zoom in close to the blue dot, and then pan along with the blue dot as it moves. Individually, I can make each of these things happen with key frames easy enough. But when I try to crop, zoom, and pan with the dot all at the same time, I can’t seem to figure out how to do it. My center point is obviously messed up and I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. Any chance someone can help walk me through this?
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3 Replies
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This job would absolutely be cake in Apple Motion; are you at all versed in using it?
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I have the program as part of my package, and I’ve used it sparingly in previous projects, but I’m far from an expert. Any suggestions on how to use Motion then or perhaps a tutorial that exists? I think part of my problem is I’m not using the correct terminology when doing google searches to try to answer this without being a pest to forums like this.
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You can export selected clips from the FCP7 timeline directly into a Motion Project, or You can open motion first, then import pre-rendered clips of the map and camera footage clips.
There’s a big red “record” button on the mini time-line of the Motion Interface. Any time that is toggled to “on”, motion is recording keyframes for whatever you’re manipulating. When it’s off, it’s not saving keyframes. Using the control sliders in the Motion Inspector pane, or the 3-d “handles” in the main window, you can rotate, position, and distort selected tracks very simply, and see in real time how the moves change during playback, for timing purposes. You can get lots more specific help on this in the actual Apple Motion forum, but really, I think you’ll get the hang of it very fast- much faster than working in, say, AfterEffects.
Play the track and see/hear the point where you need the change to start. Turn on the record button, go to the inspector pane, set a keyframe, advance one frame, set another, and then move and distort/scale the clip any way you like. Turn off the record button, and play back the result. Do it again, this time, set the first and last keyframe, then turn off the red button, move the timeline cursor to the middle, turn on the red button, move the box with your driver image into the right spot for that portion of the timeline, turn the red button off, check your playback again. Always set the first and last keyframes first, then go back and adjust the middle, then divide that in half again and adjust again, this is the most efficient way to keyframe a complex track.
Moving and cutting or copy/pasting the individual keyframes is easy in the keyframe viewer. If you watch the keyframe viewer while the tracks play, you can tell which colored line and which keyframe dot you want to isolate and manipulate. If you can do rubber-band audio tracks in FCP7, you can do this.
BTW, if you want to get good at Motion in a hurry, you can’t go wrong with COW member Stephen Smith’s tutorial DVD – it’s a STEAL, and will make you an expert in just one day. It’s available here on the COW web site, I recommend it.
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