Are you a beginner to Fusion or DFX+? This tip outlines the process and basics of panning and/or zooming a large image for video (basically doing what a Rostrum Camera does.) Handy for focusing on particular areas of large maps or photographs.

If you have any difficulties with the tutorial make sure to download the original flow which you can study to see how the effect is created, or add your own photo to the Loader tool.


Requirements: Fusion 5, DFX+ 5
Comp:  Flow (81 K)

Be sure to download the image for the tutorial from above before starting.

1. 1. Start by opening your preferences in Fusion/DFX+ and confirm that the frame format matches your output. (NTSC or PAL) This will govern what the default resolution is for your background tool.

2. Create a new composition
3. Set the desired frame range in the global box, and the render ranges. In this example we will use an animated range from 0-150.

4. Add a background, using the green [BG] tool, or selecting the menu "Tools-->Loader/Creator-->Background"

5. With the background selected (yellow) add a loader. You can do this by clicking on the green [LD] tool in the toolbar, or selecting in the menu, "Tools-->Loader/Creator-->Loader"
   
   
   This will create an auto merge for you, and will have the background tool as the background (brown arrow) and the loader as the foreground tool (green arrow).

6. In the controls for the loader, set the "Hold Last Frame" to 150.
   
   
   
   At frame 0 we will begin panning across the image to read the words Digital Fusion. We do this by adding a path to the Merge 1 center. To add a path, and animate it over the first 150 frames of the flow, do the following;

7. Select the "Merge 1" and open it's controls.
8. Confirm you are still on frame 0. This is important, as you add a path, or bezier spline, it will create a key on the current frame.

9. Right click on the center settings, and choose "Set Key Creating Path."
   
   
   
   After doing this you will notice that the color of the x & y values changes and Fusion/DFX+ adds a spline toolbar to the side of your view. In this case, we will change the values of the path using the "Merge 1" center cross hair.
   
   
   
   

10. In the large view, using the mouse, click on the right hand side of the cross hair, and drag to the right. Keep an eye on the values in the control panel, and stop about 1.4 on the x axis. If you can not move the cross hair this far, just type the value into the box.

11. Go to current time of 149, and drag the cross hair to -0.4. If you have lost sight of the cross hair, you can also just enter the value into the x position of the "Merge 1" tool.
    
    
    
    Now if you scrub in the timeline, you will see that the image pans across the words eyeon. It seems a bit linear still, so lets fix that first, before we move on to the zoom.

12. Open the spline editor by using the tab just under the large view, or by hitting [F8]. You should see a diagonal line, representing the displacement of the "Merge 1" center over the path. (You may have to hit the "Fit" button to see all of it.)

13. Box select (drag a box using the left mouse button around) both points.

14. Right click, and select smooth. Alternately, you can type [shift]+[s] to smooth the spline points.
    
    Now the motion of the pan has a smooth in and a smooth out. This is much more pleasing to the eye. Next we will add the zoom portion of the project.

15. Confirm you are still on frame 149.
    
    
16. In the controls of the merge 1, right click on the size value and select "Set Key Creating Bezier Spline"

17. Go to frame 149.
    
    
18. Drag the slider down to about 0.36
    
    As you can see, it resizes the image back down to fit in the screen, however it also moves off to the left. This is because currently the merge center is at -0.4 in the x axis. We need to animate the center moving back to the center of the frame, (0.5 x 0.5).

19. Confirm you are still on frame 149.
    
    
20. In the "Merge 1" center values, enter 0.5 into both the x and y.

If you now create a preview or render this out, you will have a nice animation. If you want to go further, try smoothing out the splines on the zoom, and second half of the path. Or try adding motion blur to the merge 1 tool!

- Michael Wolf adds, "If you pan extremely large images, like images intended for print, and you get a moire/flickering effect, adding motion blur to the merge tool can eliminate most of that, since it acts a bit like a supersampling filter (as long as there is some motion in the path, it doesn't help with still merges...). It gets rid of most of the moires/flicker that I get, I just have to up the mblur a lot sometimes. (I use the described technique with 40MB .tifs intended for print)."

- If you are still seeing a moire/flickering effect when playing back your animation, especially a slow moving pan or zoom, set your background most layer, or the layer that the large image is being panned over to process as Fields as opposed to Frames. This will basically double the amount of frames (in fields) for the animation to move across and provide substantially more in-between frames to help smooth things out.

Now you know how to animate a merge to get a rostrum camera effect.