A screenshot would help, and a screen recording would be even better so we can see exactly what you're trying.

Use the Alt+PrintScreen (or Win+Shift+S on Win10) keys, then open the Paint app and use the Ctrl+V keys to paste the image there. Next, use File > Save As > PNG picture or JPEG picture to save the file someplace you can easily find it, like your desktop.

Finally, click on the Attachments button directly underneath the text reply box and locate the screenshot to share it with us:




You can instead use the included ScreenRecorder and either attach the recording as just described, or upload it to YouTube and paste a link to it here.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I attached a ScreenRecorder of what I'm trying to do.
At about 18 seconds into the crop/zoom window I am pausing the video and want to add a keyframe so I can zoom the video from the beginning (where it is not zoomed) up to that point (18 seconds into it).

As you can see, all of the keyframe icons are greyed out. They will only appear if I allow the video to play for about 35 seconds then all the keyframe icons appear.

Thanks...Ed

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Yes, I see exactly what's happening. You didn't mention that you were using the Crop/Zoom/Pan tool, and it limits how close you can place keyframes together.

Depending on the length of the clip, the spacing can be as close as a few frames in a short clip to the 18 seconds as shown for your 21 minute clip. The reason it does this is to allow for enough time in the finished video for the auto-generated motion arcs and other mid-point keyframes between two adjacent points you've set.

Using the PiP Designer or the Keyframes tool would solve the issue as you can place as many keyframes as close as you like, but you'd then also need to manually handle all the transitions, like using ease-in/out to ramp up/down the speed of any pans if you didn't want the default linear start/stop that standard keyframes provide.

If you want to us the C/Z/P tool for finer keyframe placement, you can cut a long clip into smaller sections. For instance, I show a "no keyframe" duration of just under 7 seconds on an 11.5 min clip.

The downside to doing this is that you may end up at one zoom level or panned position at the end of a section that can be difficult to exactly match when the next section starts, so planning ahead is critical. Will you need to be zooming/panning throught the entire clip or are there sections you'll be cutting out or that lend themselves to a clear opportunity to reset the C/Z/P settings?

Well that stinks that the crop/zoom/pan tool does that. Nowhere can I find reference to that behavior in documentation.

Thanks for your help.

I just ran a few numbers and the tool seems to be limited to 100 keyframes regardless of length. The closest distance that C/Z/P keyframes can be placed from each other is 1% of the clip length.

In my test, I have a 60p clip that's 11 min 32 sec and 30 frames long, so it contains a total of 41,550 frames. Taking 1% of that is 416 frames, which translates to 6 sec 56 frames and that's exactly where the new keyframe tools become available.

I also checked to see if the project framerate came into play, and it does not. The 1% value is determined by the duration of each clip regardless of how many frames it has or what frame rate the project is set to.

You can easily verify this by trimming your clip to an easy-to-work-with value, like 5 min (300 sec) or 10 min (600 sec). The first available keyframes will be exactly at 3 sec and 6 sec, respectively.

Thanks for the explaination. I'm just at a loss as to why Cyberlink designed it to function that way..

As I wrote earlier, there aren't any keyframe spacing limitations when using the PiP Designer or the Keyframe tools. They're actually a better choice for most kinds of edits, whereas the C/Z/P tool is more of a one-trick pony.

C/Z/P does make it easier to create a zoomed in window that follows the desired subject around because PD will automatically generate a smooth curve between each placed keyframe, like this:



However, if your subject is mostly stationary and/or you can zoom and pan in mostly straight lines, then it's easier to use either of the other methods.

If you want to have the panning change speed, like gradually accelerating/decelerating between endpoints, use the Ease-in/out setttings. See this tutorial for more info.

Thanks. I understand. Tried the PIP designer as you suggested and was able to do what I needed.