Pan/Crop image zoom problem

[Eugene Volchek]

[john bolton] “Hello I have set a project to 1280×720 and added the picture,. Then with Pan/Crop zoomed in and rendered to 1280×720 mp4. I do not see any flickering when viewing in Media play or VLC.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y5inewzqumdnhyo/cartoon.mp4?dl=0“

[Wayne Waag] “[Eugene]

The timeline shots are very good. On your first one–the timeline–it would appear that you have some type of track motion effect applied to your Pan/Zoom track, Track 6. From the screenshot, we can’t tell exactly what has been applied. Click on the track motion icon and select default. In fact you have some type of track motion effect applied on your other tracks as well. Intentional? If not, I’d reset to default for those tracks as well.

Since you copied the image from an online source, you obviously can’t re-scan it. During the initial scanning, someone didn’t use the descreen option found on scanning applications that reduces the checkerboard appearance found in newspaper or magazine sources. In any case, the image itself is not the problem. As John just posted, there should be no flickering. My bet is that you’ve inadvertently applied some track motion effect.”

Yep, sorry, I forgot that I applied track motion zoom on every pic, before I zoomed it in Pan/Crop. I tried to zoom without Track motion pre-zooming and the problem is gone.

So, we found the main problem, thanks everyone for help! But now there is another problem appears 🙂

That pre-zooming stage with Track motion is crucial part of my project. I need to pre-zoom all images one by one in the right spots, and then I need to apply Pan/Crop zoom settings to all images at once (so called Ken Burns effect).
That means that I need to combine Track motion and Pan/Crop zooms (and I got flickering) or I need to use Pan/Crop zoom twice (but I can’t do that, cause applying Ken Burns effect to all images erases pre-zooming settings). So, how can I manage this situation? Maybe you guys have some good advices? 🙂 Anyway, thanks everyone for help, you already helped me a lot.

[Wayne Waag]

[Eugene]

Yep, sorry, I forgot that I applied track motion zoom on every pic, before I zoomed it in Pan/Crop.

Glad we found the problem.

That pre-zooming stage with Track motion is crucial part of my project. I need to pre-zoom all images one by one in the right spots, and then I need to apply Pan/Crop zoom settings to all images at once (so called Ken Burns effect).
That means that I need to combine Track motion and Pan/Crop zooms (and I got flickering) or I need to use Pan/Crop zoom twice (but I can’t do that, cause applying Ken Burns effect to all images erases pre-zooming settings). So, how can I manage this situation? Maybe you guys have some good advices? 🙂 Anyway, thanks everyone for help, you already helped me a lot.

I’m still a bit confused about exactly what you are trying to do. In any case, pre-zooming with track motion is NOT a good approach since you automatically reduce the resolution of the image to your project resolution. My recommendation is to forget about track motion completely and do everything using Pan/crop settings. Start with your first image, open the pan/crop window, right click and select Match Output Aspect. Then, create your Ken Burns effect using keyframes. If you want to apply the same effect to the remaining images, it is very easy. Simply copy the event, select the other images, right-click, and Paste Event Attributes. The same settings will be applied to the selected images.

wwaag

[Mike Kujbida]

[Eugene Volchek] “That pre-zooming stage with Track motion is crucial part of my project. I need to pre-zoom all images one by one in the right spots, and then I need to apply Pan/Crop zoom settings to all images at once (so called Ken Burns effect).”

I do this all the time with stills that need to be cropped before being added to my timeline.
Crop the images to the desired sizes in Photoshop or your program of choice. If you don’t have one, grab IrfanView (it’s free) as it has a crop feature built into it.
Save the cropped images with a new name so that you don’t do anything to the original image.
Once this is done, add them to the timeline and apply Pan/Crop as desired.

[Eugene Volchek]

[Wayne Waag] “I’m still a bit confused about exactly what you are trying to do. In any case, pre-zooming with track motion is NOT a good approach since you automatically reduce the resolution of the image to your project resolution. My recommendation is to forget about track motion completely and do everything using Pan/crop settings. Start with your first image, open the pan/crop window, right click and select Match Output Aspect. Then, create your Ken Burns effect using keyframes. If you want to apply the same effect to the remaining images, it is very easy. Simply copy the event, select the other images, right-click, and Paste Event Attributes. The same settings will be applied to the selected images.”

Okay, I’ll try to explain better.
I got a lot of images, some of them are comic book pages (you can see them in my previous messages). At first, I need to zoom every picture to a needed block of a comic page. Then, when ALL pictures are zoomed in a right place, I need to apply Ken Burns effect to all pictures at once. But when I apply that effect, my pre-zooming settings replaced with the Ken Burns effect settings. And that is the problem.

[Wayne Waag]

Okay, I’ll try to explain better.
I got a lot of images, some of them are comic book pages (you can see them in my previous messages). At first, I need to zoom every picture to a needed block of a comic page. Then, when ALL pictures are zoomed in a right place, I need to apply Ken Burns effect to all pictures at once. But when I apply that effect, my pre-zooming settings replaced with the Ken Burns effect settings. And that is the problem.

In that case, do what Mike suggested. Crop your images before importing into Vegas. Be advised that when you do, your project resolution will be greater than your image resolution. Rather than filling the entire screen you may want to add another track below with some sort of background to ensure that your final comic book image will not look too degraded.

wwaag

[Eugene Volchek]

I thought about that, but it’s a very long way to do this. I need to crop very large amount of images, and it will take a lot of time, to open every image in photoshop, cut it, then save it, and then place it in vegas. There must be another way to do this, only in vegas.

Maybe somehow I can crop images in Pan/Crop and then make something like a nested project to each image, and then put those “nested projects” on a timeline and apply Pan/Crop zooming one more time? It’s a solution, but it will take a lot of time to make a nested project to every image, so maybe there is a way to do it faster? Or create a nested project to all images at once? Maybe batch rendering can be helpful to do this? I think there are a lot of ways to do this, but my vegas knowledges are too small to find a better solution. Maybe you know any trick how I can apply Pan/Crop once and then do some magic to be allowed to apply it one more time? 🙂 Sorry for my English, I know I’m awful, but hope you can understand what I’m saying 🙂

[Wayne Waag]

it will take a lot of time, to open every image in photoshop, cut it, then save it

Since apparently you do have Photoshop, you can create an Action for each of the three panes and then batch process all of your images very quickly. Open one of your images in Photoshop and create a Crop preset (WxHxResolution) for each of the three panes. Then create an Action for each of three presets. Create three folders with copies of the images to be processed. Use a rename utility to add a sequence number to the end of each file name. E.g. in one folder, 1 for top pane, in the second folder, 2 for middle, and in the 3rd folder, 3 for bottom pane. Then, once they are cropped, you can put all files into a single folder and they will be in the correct sequence for each image (top, middle, bottom) for easy import into Vegas.

Then batch process each of the three folders using the Actions you’ve created, move the resulting files into a single folder and import into Vegas.

wwaag

[Eugene Volchek]

[Wayne Waag] “Since apparently you do have Photoshop, you can create an Action for each of the three panes and then batch process all of your images very quickly. Open one of your images in Photoshop and create a Crop preset (WxHxResolution) for each of the three panes. Then create an Action for each of three presets. Create three folders with copies of the images to be processed. Use a rename utility to add a sequence number to the end of each file name. E.g. in one folder, 1 for top pane, in the second folder, 2 for middle, and in the 3rd folder, 3 for bottom pane. Then, once they are cropped, you can put all files into a single folder and they will be in the correct sequence for each image (top, middle, bottom) for easy import into Vegas.

Then batch process each of the three folders using the Actions you’ve created, move the resulting files into a single folder and import into Vegas.”

Thanks for the good advice! Sadly, not all of my images have this 6-box structure. And sometimes I need to zoom different places, not only top, middle or bottom part. But I get the idea, I can create a lot of presets, group images with the same zoom point and then batch process every group. Sounds great, thank you very much again for the advice 🙂

Also I found another way to do it. I have a script which can add regions to all selected events, and I can zoom images once, mark all events with regions, use batch render on them, and then apply another zoom to rendered events.

So, what do we have, in the end 🙂
I can batch crop usual images (6-blocked) with Photoshop (using Wayne Waag method). And then, batch render all other images left with “hard” zoom points. And no flickering, no tiring handwork 🙂

Thank you, guys, for the help, you are awesome. My problem was finally solved! 🙂