PPro 2.0 Scale Clip to Project Dimensions

[Steven L. gotz]

It moved from Project Settings to Preferences. But be careful. It does not work the same way. The old way merely applied the scale from the motion effect but the still or clip was left at the original resolution. The new way rasters the image to the frame size. So you can not zoom in without losing quality. In that case, you must right click on the clip and tell it to NOT scale. Then do it manually.

Steven
http://www.stevengotz.com

[Steve Freebairn]

If I remember right, you can highlight a group of items on the time line and have them be scaled right there, but I’m not quite sure if it is the same thing as what Steve said. Check it out and let us know.

[Jarheck]

I am going to have to play with this a little more but but from first glance it does not look like you loose any resolution, but instead just resets the scale ratio. I first thought it was going to cause a loss in resolution but after playing with it and doing some extreme scaling I have been hard pressed to tell much of a difference except the scale percentages were different when pulled into a similar part of the image.

So if your high rez picture has to scale down to say 25% to fit in the screen, if you used the Scale to project dimensions it would reset the scale so 25% is now equal to 100%. This would allow you to make finer movements and adjustments as the difference between 25% and 26% would be much larger change than 100% and 101%.

If someone else would like to confirm this that would be great.

Thanks

Jared

[Mike Velte]

Expirementing;
Scale clips selected, imported a 3mp pic and scale it to 500%.
Open the same pic in PS and scale it so as to match as close as possble the Premiere monitor window…about 200%. Looking at both windows side by side it appears that Premiere is doing a better job of scaling than PS. There is some jaggies, but less artifacts than PS. Premiere also does some softening.
Conclusion;
There is room to zoom/pan on stills “scalled to fit”.

[Steven L. gotz]

Mike, I don’t think we are communicating properly, or we are discussing different issues. By the way, I learned about this issue from Jacob Rosenberg on his Total Training DVD for What’s New in Premiere Pro 2. He didn’t do this, he just told us about it.

Try this:

Put a large still in the sequence without automatic scale to fit. I used a 2272X1704 still I had handy. Manually resize it with the scale parameter in the motion effect. I used 29%.

Put a second copy next to it on the sequence. Scale it using the right-click context menu and select “Scale to Frame Size”.

The first thing I see is that there are some very thin black bars on either side of the second still, so I would want to zoom in a bit to get rid of them. So I move it to 101%. No problem.

OK, now let’s get fancy. Animate the first still from 29% at the first frame to 58% at the last. Looks fine, right?

Now, animate the second still from 101% to 202% – which should be the same size, right?

I was lucky and a person way far off in the background had on red shoes. The shoes were very clear in the first still, and a bit blurred in the second. And we are not even at 100% yet compared to the original still.

Now lets get crazy. Get rid of the keyframes by turning off the stopwatch on both stills. Bring the first still to two times it’s current size. From 58% to 116% – and the second still from 202% to 404%.

OK? See the problem? Any time you zoom in on an automatically scaled clip by any amount, you lose quality and if you zoom back in on a manually scaled clip, you don’t begin to lose quality until you exceed 100%.

Steven
http://www.stevengotz.com

[Mike Velte]

“I see” said the blind man as he took his hammer and saw! Dont use the auto scale feature if you plan on zooming in.

[Steven L. gotz]

Which is really sad because the auto scale used to use the scale parameter so all you had to do was start from that point. No more. Big change and nobody has mentioned it much.

Steven
http://www.stevengotz.com

[Andy Garrett]

As I have mentioned previously, any scaling of clips in Premiere using Transform or via scaling clips to project dimensions in Premiere Pro 1.5 causes significant softening. Event DV had an article on various editing softwares and in their test of HDV footage being resized in Premiere they found this softening as well.

I was simply trying to permanently letterbox 16×9 footage by importing it into a 4×3 project but even this causes unacceptable softening of the image.

Basically Premiere sucks at resizing or using transform to zoom in on an area.

[Steven L. gotz]

I have not detected this softening, but I use Aspect HD, so that could be a difference.

Steven
http://www.stevengotz.com