A Tip For Handling Panning Scenes

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TaranT
Joined: Wed May 16, 2001 11:20 pm
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A Tip For Handling Panning Scenes

Post by TaranT » Mon Aug 09, 2004 2:46 am

This was originally a reply to Fungie½ over at Video Announcements, but rather than bury it there, I thought there might be some new people who would be interested. I know that other people are using this technique, but I don't recall a thread about it specifically. Experienced editors may in fact have more sophisticated methods.

The topic is how to make those horizontal and vertical panning scenes look better, especially when you want them to run slower than the original speed.

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Fungie½ wrote:
TaranT wrote:Those long pans might be made smoother by using stills-plus-motion settings. PM me if you're interested in knowing how (it's easy).
Wow, definately. I use Premiere 6 so any help you could give me would be great.
Well, it's so simple you might be doing it already. And if you're not, you'll wonder why you never thought of it before.

What you need is some kind of photo editing software that "stitches" two pictures together. PhotoImpact (what I use), Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop are the better known packages. There are others, including some freeware.

The concept originated several years ago when people wanted to merge two or more photos into a single wide panoramic picture. You can do the same with a long pan (vertical or horizontal) in anime footage by extracting two stills from the clip...then stitching them together to make one wide picture.

That new pic goes on the timeline and you apply motion settings to pan the viewpoint across the picture. Since it's a still, the speed of movement is entirely under your control. The motion will look smooth within the constraints of whatever compression method you're using.

I don't use Premiere so I can't help with the motion setting, but you probably know how to do that already. I will advise taking extra time to make sure the merge is as perfect as you can make it. In a slow pan any defect will be more than obvious, especially on a 20 foot screen. However, the technique is easy enough that you can make a quick pic, see what it looks like on the timeline, then go back and clean it up.

Not every panning scene can be worked this way. Some scenes have sliding layers, others have lighting changes, many have some objects moving in them that can't be ignored.

For examples, check out the first, second, and sixth scenes in my Porco Rosso vid.

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AMVfreak
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Post by AMVfreak » Mon Aug 09, 2004 3:54 am

I didnt know they called that Ghibli movie "Porco Rosso" -_-
I only watch japanese anime most of the time, and I've watched Ghibli in that matter as well, so I didnt know that that was what it was called in English.

I liked it so I'll drop off a opinion on it.

And nice explanation there TaranT
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Sir_Lagsalot
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Post by Sir_Lagsalot » Mon Aug 09, 2004 12:02 pm

I've done that before, although the reason was for visual quality. Its very easy to open up one big image and get it nice and spiffy looking in a photo-editor than to do the same for a few seconds of video, since the editor allows you to spot-edit out noise, artifacting, etc. Also, if you have a still image being panned, then the video will compress better with a lossy codec due to the fact that there is no noise in the motion areas, allowing the codec to simply move part of the image. I use the pan filter for virtualdub though, it seems to do a better job than the motion settings in premiere.

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