Can I Move Video Around Without Track Motion Sony Vegas

Event pan/crop vs track motion

BrianJK wrote on 11/17/2011, 8:25 PM

I'd swear that I read that there is a preferred method for resizing stills (in my case jpegs from PowerPoint) for optimum legebility. I'm obviously not searching for the correct terms 'cause I'm coming up empty. Can someone remind me which is better & why?

Thanks,
Brian

Comments

Former user wrote on 11/17/2011, 8:28 PM

Pan/crop keeps the still image in its original resolution.

Track motion treats it in the project resolution.

Dave T2

You use pan/crop for panning or cropping an event.

You use track motion when you want the entire track to move around as a whole.

Events have their own resolution, tracks are at the projects resolution. Think of track motion as moving your TV around. If you move it closer to your face the detail doesn't increase.

BrianJK wrote on 11/18/2011, 4:59 AM

Thank you both. I think the 'moving the TV closer to your face' image will stick with me going forward !

Cheers,
Brian

Brian,

John Meyer illustrated this point very clearly in another thread:

QUOTE
In general, NEVER use track motion to zoom photos. Why? Because Vegas first downsamples the photo to project resolution and then zooms into the photo if you use track motion. By contrast, if you zoom using the pan/crop control in the event, Vegas starts with the full resolution of the photo, and then zooms into that. The difference between these two things can be ENORMOUS: it is not subtle at all.
UNQUOTE

Lou

Your biggest obstacle in understanding this is resizing……well you can't resize it's impossible. Zooming is not resizing…… it's... zooming ...the size stays the same.

To help you understand the difference think of it like this.

You have a camera with a lens that can zoom and pan and this same camera is sitting on a rail track which is set up in a room/scene.
When you want to zoom INTO your subject you would use lens zoom = pan.crop but when you want to zoom ONTO your subject use the dolly track = track motion

The camera lens zoom only has auto focus so if you zoom using the lens it will always be in focus and detail depending on your image size. So bigger is better
The camera on the other hand has set limits 1080 0r 720 pixels etc.

So = lens = pan and zoom
Camera on dolly track = track motion
Camera settings = project settings

For example on a 720p project settings = while you are tracking ONTO a subject in 720 pixels and at same time zoom INTO your image the camera can only record 720 but the lens can zoom in very close always in focus but the cam is set to 720p so the best you will get is 720 pixels.

Once you grasp this you then and ask "why the hell then is shadow on pan and zoom and not on track motion?" the answer did come to me once after a heavy night out but in the morning it was gone. As you have to zoom out of the image to activate it and zooming in defeats the object of having it there in the first place.
The only solution to this is to nest your projects.

Except in your example, using the zoom lens or physically moving the camera keeps the same input resolution to the lens. With your example you'd say zooming/moving the camera = pan/crop, moving the person around behind the camera = track motion.

Just stopping, reading the names of the respective tools and thinking before acting is the best way to understand them. Most people who don't get it at first (me included) just thought "hey, I can zoom in with track motion!" w/o actually thinking that the names of the tools are very specific in meaning.

Byron K wrote on 11/19/2011, 1:49 PM

In addition to what others have mentioned, another thing to be aware of when using Track Motion is the frame of the clip can become visible when zooming and/or rotating.

Took me a while to figure this out so now I do all my pans, rotates and zooms in Pan/Crop.

Here's a screen capture of an old video to what I'm referring to...

http://s648.photobucket.com/albums/uu208/bk-vegas/?action=view&current=trackmotionedge.png

Of course this can happen when manipulating an image or event in Pan/Crop but it's easier to control and quality is better..

johnmeyer wrote on 11/19/2011, 5:31 PM

Rory makes some interesting points about zooming vs. moving the camera. Hitchcock used both at the same time in the tower scene in Vertigo and also the staircase sequence in Psycho. They do give you very different feelings.

However, the OP's question is about still photos, so there is no possibility of camera movement, because the photo is from one moment in time. More important, all the issues about 720p or 1080p don't apply because, typically, the still photo contains far more pixels than any video frame. Thus, as I described above, the big issue is knowing how and when Vegas resizes these megapixels down to whatever project resolution you might have.

In addition to what I said in the quote above, I should also point out one other subtle point, and that is that the project resolution is very important. I say this because some people set the project resolution to match the resolution of the final project which often is a DVD. This means that the problems involved in using track motion to resize stills is even worse. Thus, when dealing with stills you can avoid problems by setting the project resolution to match your HD sources.

One thing I have never tried, but which might let you use track motion (which is more intuitive for some people and may be easier to work with, depending on your workflow) and that would be to set the project resolution to more or less match your still photo resolution. You'd still want to keep the aspect ratio of the project resolution the same as your final render.

I am not recommending this, because I haven't actually tried it myself, but it might be a solution to the problem.

Brian compared pan and crop vs track motion. Versus or opposed to = This tells me that he feels they are the same thing because visually the effect might look the same but they are not, they both have different functions one cannot be used for the other or used to compensate for the other.

For example track motion can be used to track many objects like text and photo combined. Tracking on to text with images is not zooming, in tracking the visual screen might appear to look like a zoom the difference is that in a zoom everything increase in exact proportion to each other. Tracking on the other hand things increase in relation to each other.

Example

Example in Sony Vegas

There is no way you could do this in pan and crop. Tracking keeps elements in relation to each other. So as John said tracking to replace zoom would be undesirable so would zooming for tracking.

I have found that if I keep my projects at desired output res that that would be the best you will ever get it. I have also found that with text = keeping aspect and res constant without any resampling
Gives me the cleanest results, that is to say if I am doing a clip for dvd then text with the appropriate point size will give me the best results. doing the clip at 1052 project then resampling to dvd is bad kungfu for text. That's just me.

Love your examples, Rory. Informative and amusing at the same time. Well done and thank you.

Richard

No one pick up on therapy? After a while with Pro Titler you will need it.

Can I Move Video Around Without Track Motion Sony Vegas

Source: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/event-pan-crop-vs-track-motion--86936/

Share this post