Can't get smooth pan/zooms using keyframes

I love FCPX's KB now too!

And by the way, just for anyone reading this in the future, when I was positioning the start or end frames of each Ken Burns move, I was often frustrated by the way the frames jump around magnetically at times while I was trying to drag them into position, refusing to stay exactly where I wanted them, and making precise positioning impossible. It seems to have something to do with automatic alignment of the frames with each other, or something---a centerline would appear and they kept wanting to snap into some sort of alignment with it, away from where I wanted them to be. Whatever they were trying to do, this jiggling and jumping around of the frames was driving me nuts.

Then I discovered, by lucky chance, that if you hold down the Command key while you drag the frames around, this irritating snapping or magnetism is turned off, all the jiggling and jumping stops, and then you can do very precise placement of the frames.

Thanks once more, Alchroma!

My guess is I'm not doing something right. I cut the clip into three pieces and am trying to apply the Ken Burns effect to the middle one. The first segment is set to Fill. The center one, the one that I'm trying to do the Ken Burns thing on, is set to Fit. Below are screenshots.

I created a fresh clip for this try, and this time, as you see, the green Start rectangle is now offset to the right, but it still doesn't enclose the image. When you click Done on the Ken Burns window and play the clip, the image appears to jump to the left when it gets to the middle segment.

Tom

Thanks Tom. But I’m having some trouble doing that, because the “Start” frame of the Ken Burns effect doesn’t fit the full frame of the image in the viewer, if you get what I mean, and I can’t adjust it to fit.

I’m using high-res scans of old historic photos, and my project is in the 4:3 aspect ratio (720 X 480) because that is the shape that best matches most old photos.

So the first thing I do when I load one of these old photos into the Timeline is adjust the image to best fit in the Viewer. Often the photo doesn’t quite fill the viewer in height or width, so a bit of zooming-in is necessary to fill the frame all the way around.

After I do that, and then cut the clip into thirds, so that I can do the Ken Burns thing in the middle third, the “Start” frame of the Ken Burns effect doesn’t fit the full frame of the Viewer, and I can’t figure out how to resize it to fit.

When I drag it so the sides of the green frame fill the viewer, the top and bottom are out of sight, but if I make the top and bottom fit the viewer, the sides are indented. Is there any way to make the green “Start” frame of the Ken Burns effect fit the 4:3 aspect ratio?

Tom B.

Thanks Tom. I tried it, but I can't get it to work right. I set the conform to Fill, but the green Start rectangle doesn't appear to enclose the image exactly. It's slightly offset to the left, and seems "magnetically" stuck there. If I try to pull it slightly to the right, where it needs to be in order to fit exactly around the image, it pops right back to the left. The left side of the green rectangle is slightly off the image, into the black background area, and the right side of it is slightly into the image.

Besides that, when the playhead passes from the still image to the piece of clip with the Ken Burns effect applied, there is a jump to a slight zoom.

Tom B.

Thanks again for your help, Tom. It is much appreciated. I guess the way I'm doing things, it won't work in this case, but I can see how well it does work in the example you provided, when the circumstances are right.

In my case, the trouble is that many of the old photos that I'm using cannot usually be left centered as they appear when first dropped into the Timeline. Often they were shot slightly off-center by the original photographer, or the item of interest is not dead-center in the photo, or some other reason requires the image to be repositioned slightly before any panning and zooming begins.

Apparently, as you noted, the FCPX Ken Burns effect as we've been trying to do it is not able handle a picture that is slightly offset like that.

In this particular case, three of the men in this photograph are still alive (well into their 90s), and I have interviewed them on-camera, and now I'm letting them tell their wartime experiences in this video I'm creating, using photos such as this one to illustrate what they're talking about. I need to find some way to start out with this photograph full-frame (slightly adjusted as noted), and continue to hold the full frame long enough for me to say something about the crew in a voice-over narration, then zoom in smoothly on the first person I interviewed (the pilot, front row, far left), then pan smoothly across to the next person I interviewed (the navigator, front row, far right), then up to the third person (waist gunner, back row, second from right).

And after that, throughout the video, whenever one of the men describes the actions of some other member of the crew, I need to bring this picture back up and zoom smoothly in on the face of the person he's talking about.

And of course, I have many other photos in this project to do similar things with, some showing details of the aircraft, others showing such things as the tents the crew lived in on the ground, and many other illustrations for their stories. Whatever is of interest in each photo needs to be zoomed in on, and in addition often panned across to show other details in the same photo.

I tried, but I just can't do this in FCPX with keyframing. I ran into the same old problems I did in FCP 7---the jerky starts and stops, the wavy motion paths at beginning and end (which are not eliminated by the "Smooth" control), and once again I had to give up on FCP's keyframing.

So since this video depends so much on the panning and zooming on old photos, it looks like I'm going to have to find a third-party plug-in somewhere that can handle that. I'll do a search for one, but if anyone reads this who can recommend a good one, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks again.

Tom B.

Thanks Tom. I guess Crop/Crop is not the answer either, then.

On the FXFactory website I found and downloaded (here: <http://tinyurl.com/neu8ll4>) a free "Pan and Zoom" plugin that works as a generator inside FCPX. I installed it and tried it out, and it does a very nice job, but it can only do one motion per session. In other words, you can zoom in (or out), but once it gets to the end of that motion, it's all over---there's no moving on to another place on the photo if you wanted to. However, when you only need a single motion, it's fine.

Back in Final Cut 7 I was using a stand-alone program called Photo-to-Movie to do multiple pan-zooms on photos, and it worked very well and was able to do an unlimited number of motions in one session. But it wouldn't work inside of FCP 7. I had to create the pan-zooms in Photo-to-Movie, and then export them as a Quicktime movie that I dropped into FCP. There was no adjusting the clip in FCP-7. If I wanted to change anything later, I had to go back out to Photo-to-Movie and start all over again. It was slow, but at least it was do-able.

So what I'm looking for now, ideally, is a plugin that gives FCPX the ability to do internally what Photo-to-Movie could do externally.

Fox, I followed the new directions for installing the plugin, but it still didn't show up in FCPX. No doubt I did something wrong.

So my search for a really versatile (capable of multiple moves) pan/zoom plugin for FCPX continues. . .

Tom B,

Thanks Tom & Alchroma. The free FxFactory plug-in that I installed in FCPX can do one-motion pan/zooms nicely, although you can't just drop it onto a clip and go to work on it. Instead, it starts out by asking for a still shot, and requires you to navigate out onto your hard drive and find the picture that you want it to work on. That's annoying.

Once you give it the picture, it creates a clip with it (although the clip just has a repeating flower on it instead of the picture, so you can't tell what's in the clip until you run the playhead or skimmer over it--another annoyance).

But the main problem with this plug-in, and with FCPX's Ken Burns crop effect as well for that matter, is that they can only do a single move on a picture. So I'll just have to modify my storyline to do single-move pan/zooms, separating each one with something else, such as a different picture or video clip.

In other words, what I'd really like to do is zoom in on the face of the man on the far left, in the front row, hold on his face long enough to identify him, then pan all the way across the front row to the man on the far right, linger on his face long enough to identify him, and then pan upward to the third man.

But I can't do that, being limited to single moves. Instead I'll have to do something such as zoom in on the first man, identify him as the pilot of the airplane, then dissolve into a photo of him in the cockpit, or a clip of him speaking, or something. Then I'll have to start all over again with the wide-angle group shot, zoom in on the man at lower right, identify him as the navigator, and dissolve from his face into a shot of him working with his navigation tools, or speaking, and so forth for the third man.

I can't just pan around on the picture while narrating like I wanted to.

But I guess that's how I'll have to do it until I can find a multi-move pan/zoom plugin for FCPX, if such exists.

Tom B.