[Mike Deprez]

I found a workaround to do this. Bit tricky but the result works.

I had to add clouds to a shot of a tree falling in a storm, the camera following the top part down. Of course when we shot it. it was a beautiful sunny day. I pulled a key off the blue sky and we bought a large TIFF of storm clouds to replace the blue sky

First problem is of course no tracking feature in either BCC or Avid pan and scan. So I was looking at going through frame by frame and nudging it in pan and scan following the camera motion. Then I realized that you can of course track a normal clip……

So I tracked the tree falling on it’s own layer, saved the effect to a bin and option dragged it on top of the pan and scan effect. Good news, it worked, the tracking was now moving the clouds. The problem is the tracking effect limited the large picture of clouds to raster, so you just saw black on the edges as the tracked shot moved up. So I copied that tracked pan and zoom clip to 3 tracks underneath and “Tiled” them with the 3D warp so at the end of the clip the 3 new shots filled in the black. They were all using the same tracking so they moved together. Make the edges soft and whola!

Now, I was dealing with clouds so it was easy to cover the seams. But if you grab 4 overlapping parts of the big shot in pan and scan you can nudge them around to match up and the tracking info will move them all the same.

Sorry for the long winded answer but it’s tricky workaround and took a while to engineer and I wanted to share

Folks at Boris, tracking would be a great feature to add to BCC pan and zoom 🙂 Also the ability to use pan and zoom on moving images.

[Mike Deprez]

Regarding the illegal character issue. Most of us know not to use them in drive and folder names as was mentioned previously. Check this out. I had all my AMA volumes go offline without warning. Double checked every drive, folder and file name. All good. Turns out it was a STORE BOUGHT CD from Rhino records that had a forward slash and a 2 quotes in the name of the disc on the desktop. Wasn’t playing or anything. Just having it in the tray spun down was enough to make all AMA volumes offline to the Avid. Ejected it and boom, everything back online. For the record, no pun intended, all rhino records “Top rock ‘n” roll hits” CDs have this naming convention. Example:

Billboard Top Rock ‘N’ Roll Hits/ 1974

Is the name of one of them. Who puts a forward slash in a CD name? Beware of illegal CDs!