# Best video editing app for Crop/Pan/Zoom



## Guest (Jul 13, 2006)

Hey everyone

Looking for a pro quality solution for this. Have some large screen captures that I have to pan and zoom down to fit within both HD DV and standard DV (anamorphic) boundaries. The stuff built into final cut pro leaves a lot to be desired (both control and quality wise), not to mention HUGE rendering times.

Someone showed me an inexpensive app not too long ago that did exactly this sort of thing (crop/zoom/pan) in quicktime movies, but I can't remember the name of it!

Anyone have any suggestions? (please don't suggest iMovie, iDvd or any of the final cut apps as I've tried all of this and not getting the results I need).

TIA


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## stillmot (Apr 8, 2005)

Although I really think final cut can do this very well if you know what your doing, you may want to try photo to movie which is inexpensive and works very well if your using stills. I've used it for many high-end productions/presentations.


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## ArtistSeries (Nov 8, 2004)

The best pan and scan software for us has been MovingPicture by Stagetools and Affect Effects. 
The standalone Moving Pictures works the best for 4:3 and 16:9. For HD DV images, you'll have to use the plugin within FCP (or your editing software). 

Unlike stillmot, we have used photo to movie and Still Life (it produced some Apple screen savers) and found the quality quite lacking. 

MovingPictures and AfterEffects can add a pre-blur that reduces/removes the jitters that most low end programs can't eliminate.


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## stillmot (Apr 8, 2005)

ArtistSeries said:


> The best pan and scan software for us has been MovingPicture by Stagetools and Affect Effects.


I'm curious what types of products your using this for and if you have any samples online we could view?

I'de also be very curious to hear what you find lacking about photo to movie as we have been very happy with it and only gotten great feedback.

Thanks


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## ArtistSeries (Nov 8, 2004)

Hi stillmot,
Pan and scans are used in a variety of projects - from video homages to DVD beauty product presentations. 

The lack of integration with Avid and FCP is minus - you have to break your workflow and it means that you can't fine tune within those applications

Aliasing (flicker) was the pits during certain passages (yes we used higher quality).

No TV-safe zone viewer

No Flop Field Order option

No build in video safe colour palette

No Alpha channel options


Is it better than iMovie? Yes.
What did I like about it? The Motion path and key frame simplicity.

BTW, MovingPictures is not perfect - it does crash and the interface is not "mac-like"...


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## Guest (Jul 13, 2006)

Thanks guys.

I settled on After Effects -- was hoping to not have to shell out that much $$ ... but it's working very well. As you said it does put a bit of a dent in the workflow, but the quality is great and it's not too painful, nor does it take very long to do what I need to do with it.


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## Guest (Jul 13, 2006)

and just for the sake of completeness ... I am doing this with quicktime movies -- not stills. Zoomed/Cropped sections of screen captures from 17" powerbooks that need to go into intructional video content. 

On an aside, snapz pro uses the quicktime animation codec ... but they somehow managed to limit the bitrate on them (but still keep the quality). Nothing I have seems ot let me set a maximum bitrate for this codec .. anyone have any ideas how I might be able to do this?


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

FotoMagico does a great job with stills that are then coverted to QT but not sure how about doing within the QT format.
I suppose you could export single frames as it will handle up to 3000 individual images.

If these are screen captures you should be fine with it.

Easy interface










Lots of output choices as well
This was converted for web/

http://www.macdoc.com/uploads/Untitled.mov


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