I am working with some photos and need to learn how to zoom in and out without loosing focus. Anyone have any idea on how to do that with After Effects? I have seen that done on several demos out there. Thank you for any input.
In After Effects, for each photo, set a keyframe at the beginning of the clip and at the end of the clip. You want a position keyframe and a scale keyframe.
Change the values by double-clicking on the keyframes, or by clicking once on the keyframe and then noodling around with the handles in the image above.
AE seems to do just hunky dory with panning and zooming around images with no loss of detail, but be aware that if you try too hard to magnify something, then it's going to alias as AE tries to make up for lost data.
For example, I have a viewing area of 720 x 480. I put an image in there that is 7200 x 4800 pixels. I can zoom in to 1/10th the size of the image and still see one-pixel-per-one-pixel. However, say I put an image in there that is 72 pixels wide by 48 pixels high and try to view the whole thing in the 720 x 480 window, then each pixel's gonna have to be stretched and interpolated to fill the new 10 x 10 "hole". And I'll tell you, it's gonna look crappy.
So, figure out what your tightest zoom is going to be (say, "Mom's head", then open the master image in Photoshop and make sure that the resolution is such that your "Mom's head" frame isn't smaller than 720 x 480.
Don't force After Effects to "make up" stuff.
Cheers,
Edward
"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door
I started learning After Effects two weeks ago and have built a sum total of, um, four projects on it, none longer than ten seconds. So, no worries, mate!
Cheers,
Edward
"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door
Do you know how to set keyframes? Near the text of your clip, down in the timeline, there is a little triangle pointing down. Click it. It'll expand and show you various properties of the clip. One of them (I think) will be Position. To the left of the word "Position" is a little check box. If you click it, then you can adjust the position of the clip for as long as the duration of the clip.
You add a keyframe by placing the slider to the point on the clip where you desire a keyframe. You may do this by either dragging it or using the little player-control box to nudge the cursor by a frame, or zoom it to one end of the composition.
When the timeline cursor is at the location you want a keyframe, then you click that little checkbox as I described above. A keyframe will appear on the timeline, at the cursor position. It'll probably be a little diamond.
Cheers,
Edward
"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door
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