newbie pan and zoom questions

[jepalmer]

I have PSE 6 and PE 4 and am trying to get better at making slideshows, which leads me to several questions:

In PSE6
1) I presume the pan and zoom (p/z) proportions are fixed? Any way of getting it to be a square or a veritical rectangle?
2) I use p/z start=end to crop a photo. Is there anyway of taking that p/z and applying it to the next photo in the sequence? When I have the camera on "motor drive" and take several shots in rapid sequence, the position of objects can appear to shift when I crop each photo and don't have the crop locations the same. Can this be done in PE4?
3) From my web browsing, it appears that PE4 may be the better option to do what I want. I've spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out how to p/z a photo in PE4 and cheerfully admit that I don't get it. Any suggestions on articles/tutorials?

Thanks for the help.

John

[Chuck Engels]

Hi John,
All of the versions of Premiere Elements allow you to do any type of pan and zoom you can think of.
It is all in the knowledge of the timeline and keyframing. There are also many preset pan and zoom effects available that are just drag and drop.

You can apply the same effects to as many clips as you like, just select the one that has everything you would like to copy. From the main menu select 'Copy', then select the other clips that you want to apply the effect to, and from the main menu select 'Paste Attributes', that's it

There are many resources to learn the timeline and keyframing, starting with this sites product section. There are many free tutorials to get you started in Premiere Elements and then $49.95 USD buys you the entire product section and all of the tutorials and everything else for 12 months.

The Premiere Elements 2 In A Snap book is still the best book around for learning keyframing and does not only apply to version 2, check the Resources page for a link to purchase the book.

There are some great free articles by Steve Grisetti at http://www.videoinasnap.com be sure to check the archive page.

And one of the members at the Adobe forum has put together some nice tutorials here http://www.freewebs.com/pe3help

I hope that answers most of your questions, if I missed anything please let me know

[Steve Grisetti]

Yep. I think you should construct your pans and zooms in Premiere Elements, John, based on what you're looking to do.

Photoshop Elements motion path creator is pretty intuitive. You choose a beginning frame and end frame and the program fills in the rest.

But in Premiere Elements, you can do anything -- including creating motion paths that follow curved lines and that pause for a moment and then continue, etc.

Here's an old article I wrote on creating motion paths in Premiere Elements. It may not be as overtly intuitive as it is in Photoshop Elements, but once you get a feel for it, you might never go back to the "simpler" way.
http://videoinasnap.chuckengels.com/sou ... _01-06.htm

Oh, and if you right-click on the word Motion in the Properties panel after you've keyframed your motion path, you get the option to save it as a Preset. Once it's a Preset, you can just drop it on any slide from the My Presets collection and the same motion path will be applied.

[Steve Grisetti]

Thanks, Chuck. Looks like you beat me by two minutes!

[Chuck Engels]

I was wondering where you were Steve