I’ve had several requests for tutorials on Pan and Zoom, so this week and next, this will be out topic.

This week, we’ll look into Avid’s own Pan & Zoom effect. It is used to, well, pan and zoom into images that are larger than your sequence dimensions without quality loss (as would occur if you imported the image into a bin and then used, say, a 3D Warp for panning and zooming).

We’ll create simple and a bit more complex animations, learn about the different temporal and spatial interpolation parameters, and of course I’ll hint at some best practices and some quirks of the effect.

Next week, we’ll check out the Pan & Zoom effect that is included in Boris Continuum Complete 5 or later.

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With Media Composer 5, you can access Quicktime and R3D files natively using AMA (provided you have the horsepower).

In this episode, I’ll show you how to link to AMA volumes, change the R3D source settings (such as ISO, color temperature etc.) within Media Composer, adjust the formatting and then transcode to DNxHD.

Editorial note: I apologize for the bad audio quality in this and last week’s podcast. Snow Leopard seems to reset my audio input gain now and again, but this way you finally know what quantization noise sounds like! Seriously, it’ll get better next week.

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I’m finally on Media Composer 5, so in this week’s episode, I’ll introduce you to the most obvious new features such as the Smart Tools, Realtime Audio Effects, the new Interface and some new Keyboard Shortcuts.

There are a lot of different tutorials covering similar subjects, so check out the show notes for more.

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