I could use a clear clarification on this as well. My understanding is 100% means the smoothest or less jerky keyframe possible. When landing a graphic on the screen, I usually like for it to have a very soft landing meaning that it should ease in to the last keyframe.

However, even with preferences set to 100% and keyframes set to smooth I still am not completely satisfied with the landing I get so far. It still hits with too much abruptness for my taste.

Erik

Please, somebody correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not at a computer with Vegas installed, but I think the "Smoothness" setting on the Pan/Crop feature has to do with smoothing out the motion from one keyframe to the next.

Imagine you have a still photo overhead shot of a baseball field, and you use pan crop to pan to first base (keyframe), then second base (another keyframe), then third base, etc. With smoothness at 0% your motion will be hard changes in direction -- straight lines from one base to the next, with very abrupt changes in direction at each base. With smoothness at 100% the panning will "round the bases" so to speak at each keyframe -- changing the motion from straight lines and hard corners as each keyframe is encountered to rounded corners and arcing paths from one keyframe (position) to the next.

(Or at least that's how I remember it...)

Tim L

Along with being a great tutorial, Vegas Keyframe Interpolation Envelopes by D. Eric Franks does an excellent job of explaining the various keyframe options such as smooth, slow, etc.
As I recall, it's around the 5 min. mark.

Mike

Thanks for replies.

Good example,Tim, and I'd seen the tutorial before through another thread, Mike, but had forgotten about part you mentioned: essentially a WYSIWYG animated example of the above interpolation from my Vegas manual.

As stated before, choice of what to use is related to the zeitgeist of one's projects. In my case, I feel I made the right decision with my default even though it may not be the "norm". So thanks for the confirmations.

IMO, a smoothness setting of 0% is the best default. Back when 100% was the default setting out of the box, there were too many people (including me) that experienced unexpected behavior in their pans due to this setting. In the baseball diamond example above, with a smoothness setting above 0, not only will Vegas round the corner from 1st to 2nd, but the "runner" won't even stay on the baseline from home to 1st. The pan will start veering towards the stands in anticipation of the curve from 1st to 2nd. That's great in certain instances, but it seems like a special/niche need to me. *I* prefer my computer to do EXACTLY as I tell it (linear track/smoothness=0), and I'll change the smoothness setting the 1-2% of time I might need it to do something special. Your mileage will vary.

As far as I can tell, the Smoothness setting has absolutely nothing to do with how smooth the keyframe setting of "Smooth" operates. I'm pretty sure the transition curves for the keyframe type (Linear, Smooth, Fast, Slow, Hold, Sharp) is predetermined & you just have those 6 options to choose from.

Brian

Brian, good points. However in terms of how a pan behaves between keyframes, there is also (and I'm not sure the correct term for it) the secondary centering thing. Example:

--- If motion from keyframe A to B seems off or veering, drag-aligning the center blue spot of A to match or aim for the center of B can clean up the motion. So the path of action follows the center-to-center beeline instead of just overall A location to overall B location.

Probably badly explained here, but I've found this useful.

> As far as I can tell, the Smoothness setting has absolutely nothing to do with how smooth the keyframe setting of "Smooth" operates. I'm pretty sure the transition curves for the keyframe type (Linear, Smooth, Fast, Slow, Hold, Sharp) is predetermined & you just have those 6 options to choose from.

That's correct. Vegas allows two kinds of control over the motion along the path you define using keyframes in Pan/Crop or Track Motion - spatial and temporal.

You set the spatial smoothness using the Hold/Linear/Fast/Slow/Smooth options for the keyframes to define the shape of the path - linear for a very angular path, smooth for a nice smooth curve drawn through your points, something like a spline.

You set the temporal smoothness, the way the speed the point moves along the path changes, using the Smoothness parameter.

Normally if one were emulating a rostrum camera type move within a still image one would want a nice smooth start from a standstill, accelerate as one moved across the scene and decelerate smoothly to a stop as one reached one's destination. This would be achieved with a Smoothness setting of 100%.

But if you want the move to be at constant speed you can achieve it by setting the smoothness parameter to 0%. This will give you an instantaneaous aceleration to full speed at the start of the move and an instantaneous stop at the end - i.e. you will just see constant speed throughout the move.

Mark

Mark,

Thanks for the very clear, very easy to understand explanation. I got it now!

Erik

>You set the spatial smoothness using the Hold/Linear/Fast/Slow/Smooth options for the keyframes to define the shape of the path - linear for a very angular path, smooth for a nice smooth curve drawn through your points, something like a spline.

Mark, are you sure you don't have these reversed? Below is a note I gleaned from a post here some time ago and it describes what I believe I see in Vegas. I believe the reason SCS changed the default smoothness from 100 to 0 is because with 100 you can easily overshoot the boundaries of your image (i.e., see black edges) which is spatial interpolation.

* Temporal interpolation (how the pan occurs over time) is controlled by the keyframe interpolation curve type. Experiment with temporal interpolation by right-clicking a keyframe to change the interpolation type (hold, linear, fast, slow, smooth) and previewing the result.

Jerry

I agree with TeeTime (although again, I'm not at a computer with Vegas installed).

I think the "Smoothness" setting has to do only with the actual shape (track) of the motion path -- regardless of how slowly or how linearly the motion leaves each keyframe. With Smoothness = 0, the actual motion is in straight lines from each position to the next. With smoothness = 100%, the motion track is a smoothed, rounded curve that passes through each point.

The types of nodes, as Soniclight posted graphically, shows how a parameter value changes over time, from value "A" to value "B". That parameter could be almost anything: an X position, an alpha value, a blur setting, etc. The keyframe specifies value "A" at time 1, and value "B" at time 2, and the node types specify how the change in value progresses between time 1 and time 2 -- what type of interpolation is performed.

(But again, this is from memory and I don't currently have a means to test it.)

This might help. I did a couple of quick examples and placed links (to youtube) below:

&

Blue= 100 Smoothness and liinear type
Orange= 0 smoothness and linear type

OK Figured it out. You have embedded the other one below so I have just embaedded the one whose link was wrong

Thanks for more input.

Later Edit:

Terry, you did manage to embed your 2nd vid so I'll leave the first up in this post as I did earlier. Your simple, to the point example in this particular one illustrates what I prefer: smoother more graceful motion of the blue box which used 100% Smoothness, Linear keyframe type.

Thanks :)



Blue= Smoothness 100 Type Linear

Bump

Sonic--

Ya totally lost me (though that's not hard). I'm not familiar with secondary centering within Vegas.

I *think* I did what you are saying in my example. To test, I threw a "large tiles" generated media on the screen & increased the tile width until they were huge. My first keyframe was perfectly centered on one corner of a square (via the dot in the center of the Pan/Crop screen), and then each successive keyframe was successive corners of the square (perfectly centered). A smoothness value of 0 made the pan around the square nice & straight with 90 degree turns. Any setting above 0 made the pan progressively rounder & a setting of 100 made a perfect circle pan with that exactly touched each of the 4 corners on its 360 degree path.

(note to self: if you create the keyframes before changing the smoothness setting you have to go change the smoothness setting on each keyframe. I just replicated this for my sanity & couldn't figure out why it was suddenly panning squarely with a smoothness set at 100. Turns out setting the very last keyframe only does effect much ...)

Terry,

Perfect demonstration!! Thanks for posting the video clip.

Erik

Terry, that is an excellent way to illustrate the difference between smoothness and the interpolation curve.

I was playing with animating pan/crop this morning and am wondering about part of my earlier post above:

>If you have three or more keyframes, the blue arc in the window shows the path of the center of the frame during the panning.

I seem to recall seeing the blue arc in the p/c window in the past, but I just added three keyframes and don't see the arc. When does the blue arc show up? Also, I believe there was a way to manipulate the animation by dragging the blue dot in the middle of the window - that is really what I am trying to recall and learn more about. Anyone?

EDIT: I sure like these threads where we are collaboratively learning how to get the most from Vegas.

Jerry

I seem to recall the blue path display was removed in (i think) Vegas 5 in order to accommodate new UI features. It was mentioned that if a way could be found to reintegrate it, it would return. Alas, it hasn't happened yet.

To Terry and All:

Ditto in appreciation of all of your contributions to this thread. Now...

Since I started this thingy, I should be learning from you all. But maybe because of morning denseness, I'm still a bit "Hmmm..." puzzled even after re-watching the two examples.
So lemme ask you...

Q: Am I nuts or do these two vids illustrate the

Maybe my eyes are playing tricks with me.
Or not.

Sonic, if you pause Terry's video at any point you will see a difference in each square's position. You might try setting up your own example and first just change only the smoothness (ie, keep the same keyframe types and one square smoothness zero and the other 100. See how that influences each.

Then, set the smoothness to zero for both and use different keyframe types and view the result.

Also, it might help to see what's going on if you lower the opacity of the topmost square to 50%.

Jerry

[i]>I seem to recall the blue path display was removed in (i think) Vegas 5 in order to accommodate new UI features. It was mentioned that if a way could be found to reintegrate it, it would return. Alas, it hasn't happened yet[i]

Kelly, that triggers something for me. But could it really have been that long ago - version 5? ;-)

Jerry

> Mark, are you sure you don't have these reversed?

Oops, sorry yes, I have them reversed.

Smoothness determines the shape of the path along which the motion will travel. The keyframe types determine the way the speed will vary as the motion proceeds along the path.

Mark

"Kelly, that triggers something for me. But could it really have been that long ago - version "

Yesterday I opened my copy of V4 and yes, the blue path is there. Not certain if it was removed in V5 or V6. There was certainly a few complaints whenever it was removed.

=======================================================
I've been following this thread to see if I could find anything to contribute and just found enough spare time to delve into how After Effects handles this. Interesting and dramatic increase in complexity once you open the full Pandora's box. Firstly you get a graph editor which shows you how the interpolation is happening, this really helps having a picture and you can see both the position and the velocity, cool. The other thing I learned is there's both spatial and temporal (roving) keyframes.
Whilst that's all fairly complex to take in this is fairly obviously a complex task and maybe it'd actually be easier to use and understand what Vegas is doing if some of the features that AE brings to this task were available in Vegas. I'm dead set against having Vegas suffer anymore feature bloat however the features are already there, this would be more of a helper to use what's there rather than a new feature.

One other cool trick I found from watching an AE tutorial on this that should be doable in Vegas is this:
Draw a mask, select the nodes and copy them as keyframes for position. Instantly have an objext move around a mask. OK, that doesn't sound all that exciting but it's easier to visualise where something is going to move by drawing a mask first. All the widgets are already in Vegas. All it would take is writing the code to copy the values from one place into another, no extra runtime code involved.

Bob.