How to do the zoom in and through a still image (layers)

[Kevin Richard]

I'm sure this has been answered but without knowing the proper names the keywords of "zoom" and "pan" are really too ambiguous.

You find lots of "Ken Burns Effects" stuff, which isn't hard to do.

The "new" trick that people are doing, to just explain what I'm looking for, is where they cut out the "foreground" people and then push into our out of the image making it look like they are on two different planes.

This isn't terribly difficult to do in it's basic form but I'd like to go beyond that and push in and past the people. This of course requires rebuilding the background in photoshop with something like a rubber stamp tool and a lot of liberal creativity.

But once that is done, what is the best way to move between the two images in Vegas? I've done a small test and it was decent, but moving about is cumbersome just using pan and crop. Is there a way to place them all on one track and each have their place so I can just zoom on one layer and basically move the camera through as one vs two separate tracks?

Thanks in advance and if there is already tutorials for this either point me at them or give me the names of this "technique" so I can google more successfully.

[Evan Bourcier]

I dont know if it'd help at all but I've seen guys do this a lot in after effects, setting the images up in 3d space and moving the camera through. I dont know if watching some of those tutorials might help figure out how to do it in vegas, as I've never used vegas. Sorry for not being more help!

[Ian Stark]

Kevin, take a look at Parent Motion. Simply put, you create a number of tracks, make them a child of a parent track (which can be empty), then use Parent Motion in the same way you would use track motion.

I'm not sure this will give you a great result, though, as all tracks will be moving in exactly the same ratio. In the real world, objects that are further away will change less noticeably than those closer to you. By using a shortcut like Parent Motion to fake a virtual camera you won't achieve that realism. To be honest, I think it's a choice between 'cumbersome in Vegas' or 'much easier in After Effects'.

I saw a tutorial a couple of years ago which walked you through an After Effects project and showed how to cut up and animate stills in very creative ways. I have been racking my brain trying to remember what it was called but I'm stumped! There was one particular scene which used an old still of a boxing ring, another was in a baseball park. I seem to recall it was a montage of someone's life. It had a ton of useful ideas. Anyone got any ideas what it was called or who made it?

[Leslie Wand]

think you'll find vasst does a plugin called 'scattershot' (?)

[Edward Troxel]

To actually zoom THROUGH the video (showing something else behind???) you would use 3D Track Motion.

Personally, I'd use Pan/Crop to zoom in on the image and only use 3D Track Motion to zoom "through" it. However, you could basically just do a fade while zooming in with Pan/Crop and the effect would look basically the same.