The Editblog

Our friends at Noise Industries recently released one of their very best freebie plug ins for FxFactory: Pan and Zoom. Of course everyone needs a tool to help with motion control moves, panning and zooming, Ken Burn effect, whatever you want to call it … on still photographs. The FxFactory version ups the ante a bit by allowing the same types of panning and zooming on video clips as well. There’s also a Pan and Zoom transition included for good measure.

I’ve been through a lot of pan and zoom plug-ins, some are better than others but none are perfect, and this one for FxFactory is one of the best. Noise Industries plans on improving the tool and keeping it free so I don’t know what more we could ask for.

Set-up is simple. Drop the Pan and Zoom (free) generator in the timeline, load up a still image or some footage, select your animation style, start and stop positions and a number of parameters for the duration and animation curve and you’re done. There are preview boxes in the canvas for the start and stop of the animation to help. Once you are done uncheck the Setup Mode check box, render and you have a nice move. The biggest question I had was exactly what the “eases” on the animation curve presets would feel like:

You can, of course, preview the animations but you can also look at these images to see a visual of what things like Quadratic and Sinusoidal mean.

The biggest problem I have with most any Final Cut Pro effect / generator is that you can’t just click and drag in the canvas to set a lot of your parameters. You have to always click the little + in the Controls tab and then the little + in the canvas to change the position. It would be great to just be able to click the box in the canvas and change position, rotation and size all with a drag or two. Most all FCP effects and generators act this way so it must be a Final Cut Pro limitation. Other than that the FxFactory Pan and Zoom (free) is a nice Halloween gift!