I need to do some simple panning and scanning around photos and still images.  Avid Pan & Zoom is a bit too clunky and limited, but After Effects is the major learning curve nuclear option.  Does anyone know of good middle ground, not so expensive still-image animation (camera stand) software that won't take forever to learn?

i agree that avid P&Z is a bit akward to use.  if it would let you save your preferred settings as a template, that would help a lot.  however, i find that once i get into a project & have setup the first set of parameters (spline, filter, pixle info, etc) that it is pretty easy to use.  i just copy & paste that effect over & over again, change the source pic & adjust the P&Z as needed.  if i'm going a lot of them, i usually end up with 4 or 5 that will work pretty well for most of my animation needs, with only minor tweaking.  i, like you wish i already knew AE forward & backward... but who has time to do that mid project, right!  i can't imagine that changing parameters is any eaiser in another application anyway (once you get the basics set up & copied so you're not always having to re-select "linear" instead of "ease-in" for BOTH the IN & OUT points, etc, etc...)

just my two cents, FWIW.

shane

I like the copy and paste idea.  Will try that.  Also, I cannot seem to get P&Z to work at a steady constant speed.  Obviously, I take out the "ease-in" and "ease-out" yet Avid seems to randomly choose weather the speed will be constant or not. In other words, even with the eases out, P&Z still seems to have subtle eases built in.  I've tried almost everything to correct this, but noting seems to guarantee a steady speed. I'm open to any suggestions -- thus why I was looking for an alternative still-image animation software.

remember that you can also drag the effect icon (in the top right of the effect editor) & drop it onto the timeline anywhere you want to put that same effect.  use the "add edit" key to create an empty segment on a video track & you can drop the effect icon on that segment instead of copy/pasting.  you can also drag the effect icon into a bin to save that effect (parameters & all) for use later on.

as to your question, in my experience one of the trickiest things to using the P&Z effect is remembering to change the "ease-in/out" parameters for every key-frame.  unlike some of the other settings, the "velocity" i think it is called, is key-frame specific.  so make sure you have all key frames selected (highlighted pink) when you change the velocity settings.  otherwise, it will always be changing.  (use SHIFT+click to select multiple key frames)

my workflow for setting up my first P&Z effect is to apply the plug from the effect pallet, select my first image, choose "target" for the view, change the velocity to "Linear" for in & out, select my filter (usually real-time or Gaussian for editing, then i switch it to High-Quality or Ultra HQ for rendering...depending on how many days i want it to take to render!), then i select individual key frames & set the P&Z levels i want.  unless i left something out (not in front of my avid at the moment), that's all i do before copying the effect again & selecting a different source image (& tweaking individual P&Z levels).

remember that with all key frame-based effects, the length (duration) of the clip affects the speed (or time between key frames) of the effect.  so trimming length after you have set an effect will change the speed of the momement, etc.  if i have a complex effect working or i don't want to change the speed at all, i just use the "lift" command to trim the clip length.  you may have to go in & add a couple fo new keyframes at the tail, depending on what you had in there, but it otherwise tricks the effect into thinking the clip is still the same length.

hope some of that helps. here's hoping that avid someday adds the ability to save effect configurations as templates, like it does with "styles" in the title tool.

shane

I suggest you go ahead and jump into AE.  You will likely want to learn it eventually.  And doing simple moves on stills is one of the easiest things to do in AE, without having to go into all the other powerful things it can do.  Otherwise, you're just wasting time learning some inferior program that you're likely to abandon anyway once you do start using AE.