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Hi, as far as I know, being able to achieve what you want on a single clip only with keyframes is not possible.

If you use overlay clips and masking, as Optodata indicated, it can be relatively straightforward but care will be needed to make the clips "fit" the overall screen when zoomed and panned, as well as accurately synching clips (in this particular case).

As always, there will be more than one way to achieve your overall aims, such as pre-producing clips and then fitting them into your final production, so others may have alternative suggestions.

Cheers
PowerDirector Moderator

Thanks. I didn't think that there was a function in keyframes to do this, but I was hoping I was wrong, since there are so many things that can be accomplished with keyframes and they are so easy to use and manage in Program Director 20. At least now I know and as you could tell from the video I sent you I did figure out a way to accomplish it without the keyframes.

Best wishes for the season and next year!
Bob

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Thanks. I didn't think that there was a function in keyframes to do this, but I was hoping I was wrong, since there are so many things that can be accomplished with keyframes and they are so easy to use and manage in Program Director 20. At least now I know and as you could tell from the video I sent you I did figure out a way to accomplish it without the keyframes.

Best wishes for the season and next year!
Bob

I'm now working with a long video (about 90 minutes) and I need do some cropping, etc, during the clip, but when I select crop/zoom, the keyframe window I get cannot be expanded so I can accurately place (and move) keyframes for crops, etc., unlike the keyframe windows used for other effects. There does not seem to be a way to stretch (and shrink) the displayed section of the clip.

It would very helpful (and much easier) if I could work with the longer clip and accurately place keyframes for crop/pan.

If I click on the keyframe button (rather than the Tools button) the crop keyframes are not displayed.

Bob

To make the Crop/Zoom/Pan tool full screen, click on the Maximize icon at the top right of the tool's window like any other Windows app:



If you're having difficulty finding the exact time to place your keyframes, simply use the Split tool to cut the main video into shorter sections. That won't affect the produced video and the shorter sections will give you much more keyframe placement accuracy.

Quote To make the Crop/Zoom/Pan tool full screen, click on the Maximize icon at the top right of the tool's window like any other Windows app:



If you're having difficulty finding the exact time to place your keyframes, simply use the Split tool to cut the main video into shorter sections. That won't affect the produced video and the shorter sections will give you much more keyframe placement accuracy.

I decided to try the split tool but ran into another problem. I tried splitting, setting up keyframes, then used combine to remove the split. My keyframes (and crops) disappeared. Tried the same thing but used group clips, still doesn't solve the problem.

Here's the problem

1. Split a clip.
2. Place crop keyframes as needed in first clip. One where you define the starting crop, the second where you want to end up with the crop.
3. Now go to the second clip. You don't have the second crop because it was split. So you need to somehow accurately guess at the initial keyframe crop for the second clip (which should match the second keyframe crop in the first clip) and then define the next crop keyframe.

However, you can't use the combine function to bring the two clips together without losing the keyframes you've defined.

Very frustrating. If the crop keyframe window had the same expansion/contraction ability as the other keyframe window this sould not be a problem. But right now it's a major problem when working with long clips. And I'm working with, for example, videos of an entire 1 to 2 hour performance where the camera was turned on and left alone (no operator), with the idea that by recording in 4K the raw footage can be edited with cropping, zooms, pans, etc easily to create an HD quality video.

Bob

If you want to continue to use the C/Z/P tool, you'll need to keep all of the following in mind:

1) There's normally no reason to combine clips after you've split them. PD doesn't care how many splits are on the timeline when producing, although there have been reports of audio glitchess in some cases with recent 365 releases. See this discussion for more info.

2) You will obviously need to plan your splits around the scenes where you're going to crop them so you can maintain the desired crop and zoom settings during each scene.

3) Use Rate Us & Provide Suggestions from PD's File menu to request an expandable timeline for the C/Z/P tool

4) As mentioned in this thread last year, the C/Z/P tool is meant to be a quick and easy editing tool but it has many shortcomings. For full functionality, use the normal PiP Designer or Keyframe tool

The problem is that the normal keyframes tool does not include the crop keyframes. If it did that would solve the problem. And not having the last crop (from a previous clip) creates a real problem, as I mention, since with the following clip you are starting from scratch as far as the crop. It also appears (unless I'm doing it wrong) that when you combine two split clips the crop keyframes are deleted. I will try one other thing, which is to set a second crop keyframe in the leadning clip, then set up two crop keyframes in the second clip, combine the two (hoping the keyframes are not lost), and if the crop keyframes are still there define a new clip that starts before the end of the first clip in the hope that the desired crop at the end of the first clip has been preserved. Then I could delete the crop keyframe that was defined at the start of what had been the second clip.

One of the problems is that a clip with the same crop settings for most of its length may be quite long, much longer than is available for setting crop keyframes.

I also assume that this problem (of crop keyframes not being displayed in the keyframes tool) continues with PD 21.

Bob

Hmm, it's almost like you didn't even read my suggestions

Again, there is NO reason to combine clips after they've been split (so stop trying to do that AND if you split you clip according to the scenes you wanted to crop (which means you'll have access to the starting and ending cropping keyframes int he same clip), you won't have the issue of trying to guess what size and position the clip was in in another section.

I'm also unclear on what you mean by "the normal keyframes tool does not include the crop keyframes"

Both it and the PiP Designer have Position and Scale keyframes, which are how you adjust the size and position of your cropped content. Using those keyframes is obviously a different technique than the one used in the C/Z/P tool, but they do the exact same thing without any of the limitations mentioned above.

Overall I think you'll be better off using the Position and Scale keyframes even if it takes a bit of practice to get the hang of it. there are many tutorials her on the forum, on YouTube and in the CL Learning Center to help as well

Quote Hmm, it's almost like you didn't even read my suggestions

Again, there is NO reason to combine clips after they've been split (so stop trying to do that AND if you split you clip according to the scenes you wanted to crop (which means you'll have access to the starting and ending cropping keyframes int he same clip), you won't have the issue of trying to guess what size and position the clip was in in another section.

I'm also unclear on what you mean by "the normal keyframes tool does not include the crop keyframes"

Both it and the PiP Designer have Position and Scale keyframes, which are how you adjust the size and position of your cropped content. Using those keyframes is obviously a different technique than the one used in the C/Z/P tool, but they do the exact same thing without any of the limitations mentioned above.

Overall I think you'll be better off using the Position and Scale keyframes even if it takes a bit of practice to get the hang of it. there are many tutorials her on the forum, on YouTube and in the CL Learning Center to help as well

When I say the "normal keyframe tool" I am referring to the button labeled "keyframe" which is to the right of the tools button and fix/enhance button. The C/Z/P tool is, frankly, intuitively easy to use, but I guess I'll have to look further into the PIP designer and keyframe tools. However, I did look under clip attributes in the keyframe tool and could not find anything labeled "scale".

Thanks,
Bob

Quote However, I did look under clip attributes in the keyframe tool and could not find anything labeled "scale".

I used the group name for those keyframes as displayed in the PiP Designer. Unfortunately, CL doesn't have the word Scale in the Keyframe tool, but the actual controls are called Height and Width, which is the same as in the PiP Designer (shown on the right in the screenshot below):



I agree that the C/Z/P tool is more intuitive, and it also provides an automatic zoom from one crop to another and to/from full screen but that's of little use if you can't find the exact times to make your crops.

Be sure to send feedback to the developers to increase the chances that an expandable timeline shows up in that tool in a future version.

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I used the group name for those keyframes as displayed in the PiP Designer. Unfortunately, CL doesn't have the word Scale in the Keyframe tool, but the actual controls are called Height and Width, which is the same as in the PiP Designer (shown on the right in the screenshot below):



I agree that the C/Z/P tool is more intuitive, and it also provides an automatic zoom from one crop to another and to/from full screen but that's of little use if you can't find the exact times to make your crops.

Be sure to send feedback to the developers to increase the chances that an expandable timeline shows up in that tool in a future version.

I did send a request, although not sure it got to the developers, since I finally received a reply today that misunderstood what I wrote, as if I couldn't get the crop function to work. So I wrote a reply saying it does work for me but the expansion function should be included in an update of PD.

But I did want you to know that I did finish editing my video using the crop function by just creating short clips. Each time I created a clip (starting at the beginning of the video) there usually was a second keyframe that had a crop. As long as I paid attention to that and modified or deleted it as appropriate, the editing went well, thanks to the duplicate keyframe option that allows duplicating from either the previous keyframe in the clip or the following keyframe.

Hopefully my request will be giving serious consideration and be done!

Best,
Bob Sellman

I'm glad you found a workflow that met your needs.

To be clear, a request to customer service/tech support is completely different than using File | Rate Us & Provide Suggestions, and I suggest you use that tool to make sure that your request is seen by the right people.

Quote I'm glad you found a workflow that met your needs.

To be clear, a request to customer service/tech support is completely different than using File | Rate Us & Provide Suggestions, and I suggest you use that tool to make sure that your request is seen by the right people.

Can't you pass it along? It is extremely frustrating to try to make this request (which I have tried various ways to make) and be told that I need to resubmit it somewhere else.