Zooming Question

[Chainsaw_Willie]

Hi there,

I'm a complete newb to video editing (though no stranger to photo editing) and am having a tough time getting PrEl to do what I want.

I cannot figure out how to achieve an effect in PrE 9 and am not sure if it's even possible, so hoping someone here can give me a clue.

I want to apply a zoom out effect to a still image so that at the beginning I'm zoomed way in (maybe 300%) on a street sign that appears at the left edge of the image so that this street sign fills the entire frame. I then want to zoom out to 100% so that you can see the entire still image.

In short, a zoom out effect of 300% - 100% beginning at a specific place in the frame.

How do I do this? Honestly, the numbers for anchor point and scale in the modify effects window for a zoom are really confusing and don't seem to produce the results I'm after no matter what I do with them...

I have been able to achieve this effect quite easily in a different program (AVS Video Editor) but would rather use PrEl as it does other things much better.

Thanks for any suggestions!

[Steve Grisetti]

Welcome to Muvipix, Willie!

Because you're zooming in so much, you'll need an unusually large photo. And, because of that, I'd recommend you do this operating in a separate project and then use Share/Computer/AVI with the DV settings to output it for use in your main project.

First, ensure that your photo is about 3200x2400 pixels in size. Then, before you bring it into your project, go to Edit/Preferences and ensure that Scale to Frame Size is unchecked.

Then use Get Media/From Files and Folders to import the photo into your project and place it on your timeline. When you do, you'll only see a small portion of the photo since is is several times larger than your 720x480 pixel video frame.

Then it's just a matter of using Motion keyframes to create your zoom out and other motion path.

We cover motion paths, step-by-step, in our Muvipix Guides to Premiere Elements.
http://Muvipix.com/pe9.php.

You can also see instructions for working with keyframes to create motion paths in the PDF entitled "Basic Keyframing" on this search page.
http://muvipix.com/products.php?searchp ... =0&btn.y=0

For more information on the basics of using the program, you may want to check out our free Basic Training tutorials. Just go to our products page and type "Basic Training" in the product search box.

[Chainsaw_Willie]

Thanks Steve! I had no idea what keyframing is, looks like I need to read up on it.

Honestly, I'm hugely frustrated at the difficulties I'm having accessing info/tutorials for this program - there doesn't seem to be one central source of info and Adobe didn't make it easy to find or access this information but I'll keep plugging away at it...

[Chainsaw_Willie]

Just one more quick post to say thanks again, Steve!

Read the keyframing pdf and was able to accomplish exactly what I wanted. The end product looks much better than what AVS VE was able to do also.

Now I have another question, but will make a separate post for it.