Hi Dimitrios123 -

You're right about the Preview pane in Crop & Zoom. It's very small & fixed. For that reason I barely look at it when cropping/zooming. I focus on the position/size of the Focus Area frame in the main preview.

My preference is to use PiP Designer for more accurate work, even though it looks like more work. Particularly when rotation is needed, Crop & Zoom can be set in increments of 1° where PiP Designer can be adjusted to 0.01°. Sometimes that's critical.

Using PiP Designer, your preview is effectively the same as using the focus area frame in Crop & Zoom.

Cheers - Tony
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Quote Hi Dimitrios123 -

You're right about the Preview pane in Crop & Zoom. It's very small & fixed. For that reason I barely look at it when cropping/zooming. I focus on the position/size of the Focus Area frame in the main preview.

My preference is to use PiP Designer for more accurate work, even though it looks like more work. Particularly when rotation is needed, Crop & Zoom can be set in increments of 1° where PiP Designer can be adjusted to 0.01°. Sometimes that's critical.

Using PiP Designer, your preview is effectively the same as using the focus area frame in Crop & Zoom.

Cheers - Tony

Hello Tony and many thanks for your response.

Indeed PiP is very accurate - sometimes I do need increments smaller than 1°. Plus that, as you said, PiP has this nicely huge preview window. Alas, the need to set separate keyframes for cropping introduces too much workload for me. If it could automatically crop the blank areas, PiP would be perfect.

I am very disappointed from PD16 on that matter. Does anyone know the workflow in competitive applications?

Regards

You set the keyframes for position, scale and rotation just once: At the beginning.
If you change any of the things, a keyframe is set automatically.
And (up)scaling and setting a new location of the clip (a new "viewport"), is just the same as crop&zoom.



Hatti Win 10 64, i7-4790k, 32GB Ram, 256 GB SSD, SATA 2TB, SATA 4TB, NVidia GTX1080 8GB, LG 34" 4K Wide, AOC 24" 1080

Hello Hatti,

I didn't know that changes of viewport could automatically insert keyframes. Nice tip! So, I experimented in Keyframe window and found that I don't even need to set any keyframe at the beginning of the clip. All that is needed is to:
1. Find the first point of interest then click Keyframe button in the main application window
2. Set a rotation keyframe there and adjust the amount of rotation
3. Adjust the viewport in order to remove the black stripes (the weakest part of this method!)
4. (usually needed) Reset the Position keyframe in order to remove the unwanted move that was introduced in step 3.

Still clunky since it requires a lot of mouse clicking. But it's much more precise (ie more rotation and timeline resolutions, and it uses a larger preview window) than Crop & Zoom. Comparing to the PiP Designer, the Keyframe method it seems less choppy to me, plus that playing the clip does not prevent editing of clip attributes (as in PiP). I will experiment on this in difficult camera tilt situations. Still Crop & Zoom, with its dedicated window and simpler cropping (i.e. without altering position), is imho much easier and faster in cases of heavily unstable videos (as it usually happens in the football games I shoot).

I could improve my shooting technique in order to reduce this damn tilting but alas I cannot cope with the small camera viewfinder nor with its lens distortion. Probably both the camera and the shooter is to blame because even in photography I am not good in keeping horizons straight! In Photoshop and Lightroom, rotation automatically adjusts (crops) the resulting black stripes. I wonder whether Premier is able to do the same thing. Surely it's not about still images but...

update: Since my previous post, I have refined my Keyframe workflow as such:

1. In the main (timeline) window, find the first point of interest then click Keyframe button
2. Enter a rotation value (Clip Attributes group) and press Enter. A rotation keyframe is created (note: clicking the respective keyframe "diamond" is not needed)
3. Without moving the playback slider, enter the value of Height or Width (note: clicking the respective keyframe diamond is not needed), press Enter. After experimenting, I found that I have to increase the value by a factor of ~0.03 times the rotation change. E.g. +/-1 degree of rotation needs ~1.03 Height or Width. This step will remove the black stripes.

As long as "Maintain Aspect Ratio" is checked, step 3 is a relatively easy way to crop without affecting positioning or introducing distortion.

Still a bit slow and the preview is choppy (when I drag the playback slider) but definitely more accurate than Crop & Zoom. Thank you all for your contributions to this discussion. They inspired me to try new things and improve my workflow.