Section 2.5. Limit Zooming and Panning


2.5. Limit Zooming and Panning

In a way, camcorder manufacturers are asking for it. They put the zoom-in/zoom-out buttons right on top of the camcorder, where your fingers naturally rest. That tempting placement has led millions of camcorder owners to zoom in or out in almost every shotand sometimes even several times within a shot. For the camcorder operator, zooming imparts a sense of control, power, and visual excitement. But for the viewer, zooming imparts a sense of nausea.

In other words, most home-movie makers zoom too much. In professional film and video, you almost never see zooming, unless it's to achieve a particular special effect. (Someday, rent a movie and note how many times the director zooms in or zooms out. Answer: almost never.)

2.5.1. Tips for Keeping Zooming Under Control

To separate yourself from the amateur -video pack, adopt these guidelines for using the zoom controls:

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Automatic Gain Control

Where's the recording-volume knob on my camcorder?

There isn't one. Modern consumer camcorders use something called automatic gain control (AGC). They set the volume level automatically as you record.

That may sound like a neat feature, but it drives professionals nutty. AGC, in essence, strives to record all sound at exactly the same level. When something is very loud, the AGC circuit quiets it down to middle volume; when something is very soft, the AGC circuit boosts it to middle volume.

Over the years , automatic-gain circuitry has dramatically improved. The electronic boosting or quieting is smoother and less noticeable than it once was. Even some modern camcorders, however, sometimes exhibit the unpleasant side effects of AGC circuitry : Try filming something that's very quiet, and then suddenly clap right next to the microphone. On lesser camcorders, when you play the footage back, you'll hear how the sudden, loud sound made the AGC back off, cutting the volume way down in anticipation of further loud noises. It takes the camcorder several seconds to realize that the surrounding sound is still quiet (and to boost the volume level back up where it had been).

Fortunately, that sudden-adjustment syndrome is a rare and usually harmless occurrence. For most purposes, camcorders do an excellent job of setting their own volume level (although it certainly evens out the dynamic highs and lows of, say, a symphony performance).

Besides, you don't have much of an alternative. Only a few, more expensive camcorders permit you to override the AGC circuit (and adjust the sound level manually). Even if you plug in an external microphone, most camcorders take it upon themselves to adjust the sound level automatically.


  • The zoom button is ideal for adjusting the magnification level between shots, when the camcorder is pausedto set up a new shot. Be conscious of how many times you're using the zoom while the tape is rolling.

  • Sometimes you may be tempted to zoom in order to create an establishing shot to show the entire landscape, the big picturebefore closing in on your main subject.

    That's a worthy instinct, but zooming isn't the best way to go from an establishing shot to a closeup. Instead, consider an effect like the extremely effective, more interesting one that opens such movies as Citizen Kane: a series of successive shots that dissolve, one into the next, each closer to the subject than the previous. (See Figure 2-3.) Open with a wide shot that shows the entire airport; fade into a medium shot that shows the exiting masses of people; finally, dissolve to the worried face of the passenger whose luggage has vanished. Naturally, you can't create the fades and dissolves while you're shooting, but it's a piece of cake to add them in iMovie. Your job while filming is simply to capture the two or three different shots, each at a different zoom level.

    Figure 2-3. Zooming, as represented here by several sequential frames (left), is a dead giveaway that the movie is homemade.
    Try a more professional sequence to set up your shot: Hold on a wider, scene-establishing shot, cut to a medium shot, and then cut to a closeup (right).


  • You don't have to avoid zooming altogether. As noted above, professional moviemakers rarely zoom. One of the exceptions, however, is when the director wants to pick one face out of a crowd , often just as some horrific realization is dawning. Furthermore, when you're filming somebody who's doing a lot of talking, a very slow, almost imperceptible zoom is extremely effective, especially if you do it when the speech is getting more personal, emotional, ominous, or important.

    The point is to use zooming meaningfully, when there's a reason to do it.

  • For the lowest motion-sickness quotient , use the hold-zoom-hold technique. In other words, begin your shot by filming without zooming for a moment; zoom slowly and smoothly; and end the shot by holding on the resulting closeup or wide shot. Don't begin or end the shot in mid-zoom.


    Tip: Documentary makers frequently film with this pattern: Hold for five seconds; zoom in, and then hold for five seconds; zoom out again, and hold for five, then stop the shot. This technique gives the filmmaker a variety of shots, providing choice when editing the final movie.All of this sheds light on another reason to hold at the end of a zoom, and another reason to avoid zooming in general: When editing, it's very difficult to make a smooth cut during a zoom. Cutting from one nonzooming shot to another is smoother and less noticeable than cutting in mid-zoom.
  • Consider how much to zoom. There's no law that says that every zoom must use the entire 500X magnification range of your camcorder.

  • Did you ever see Wayne's World either the movie or the Saturday Night Live skit on which it was based? Wayne's World, of course, was a spoof of a hilariously amateurish public-access cable TV show that was supposedly shot with a camcorder in somebody's basement . The show's trademark camerawork: multiple zooms in a single shot. (Such annoying shots are always accompanied by Wayne and Garth shouting, "Unnecessary zoom!")

    As rare as zooming is in professional TV and film, multiple zooms in a single shot are virtually unheard of. To avoid creating a Wayne's World of your own, consider zooming only once, in only one direction, and then stop to focus on the target. Don't zoom in, linger, and then continue zooming; and don't zoom in, linger, and then zoom back out (unless you intend to discard half of that shot during editing). Furthermore, on camcorders equipped with a variable-speed zoom, keep the zoom speed consistent. (The slowest zoom is usually the most effective.)


Note: There's an exception to the avoid-zooming-in-and-out-while-shooting rule. That's when you're filming a one-of-a-kind event and you're desperate to keep the camera rolling for fear of missing even a second of priceless footage. In that case, zoom all you want to get the shots you want. But do so with the understanding that the good stuff won't be the zooming footageit will be the scenes between zooms. Later, you can eliminate the unnecessary zooms during iMovie editing.

2.5.2. Panning and Tilting

Panning is rotating the camera while recordingeither horizontally, to take in a scene that's too wide to fit in one lens-full, or vertically (called tilting ), to take in a scene that's too tall.

In general, panning is justifiable more often than zooming is. Sometimes, as when you're filming a landscape, a skyscraper, or a moving object, you have no alternative. Standard camcorder lenses simply aren't wide-angle enough to capture grand panoramas in one shot, much to the frustration of anyone who's tried to film New Zealand landscapes , New York skyscrapers, or the Grand Canyon.

Even so, some of the guidelines listed above for zooming also apply to panning:

  • Pan only when you have good reason to do so. One of the most common reasons to pan is to track a moving target as it moves through space. (Interestingly, professionals pan most of the time from left to right, the way people read, except when a shot is meant to be deliberately disturbing .)

    Infact, almost any pan looks better if there's something that "motivates" the camera movement. A car, train, bird flying, person walking, or anything else that draws the eye justifies the pan and gives a sense of scale to the image.

  • Begin and end the pan by holding, motionless, on carefully chosen beginning and ending images.

  • Make an effort to pan smoothly and slowly. This time, you can't rely on the camcorder's electronics to ensure smoothness of motion, as you can when zooming. Bracing your elbows against your sides helps. (If you pan too fast, you may create what's known as a swish pan a blurry shot that's intended to be disorienting, as when the main character, being chased through a crowd, is desperately turning his head this way and that in an effort to spot his pursuers.)

    POWER USERS' CLINIC
    Recording Entrances and Exits

    When it's possible, record the "entrances and exits" of moving subjects in to, and out of, your camcorder's field of vision. For example, if you're filming two people walking, film the space where they're about to appear for a momentand then, when they enter the frame, pan the camcorder to follow their movement. Finally, stop panning and let your subjects walk clear out of the frame.

    Entrances and exits like this make more interesting footage than simple follow-them-all-the-way shots. By letting the motion occur within the frame, for example, you emphasize the motion. If a car zooms across the screen, and then exits the frame, your viewers can see how fast it was going. But if you track the car by panning all the way, you diminish the sense of motion. It's hard to tell how fast a car is moving if it's always centered in a panning shot.

    More important, frame entrances and exits can help make your editing job easier, thanks to their ability to disguise discontinuous action. Suppose, for example, that you've got a medium shot of a schoolgirl starting to raise her hand. But the shot ends when her hand is only as high as her stomach. Now suppose that the next shot, a closeup of her face, begins with her hand entering the frame from below, whereupon it heads for, and finally scratches, her nose. You can safely cut from the stomach shot to the nose shot; because of the hand's entrance into the frame, your cut looks natural and motivated. The " entrance " disguises the fact that the hand was at stomach level in one frame and at face level in the next.

    Without that entrance, you'd wind up with a jump cut an irritating discontinuity in time from one shot to the next.


  • Avoid panning more than once in a shot. Make an effort not to perform such classic amateur maneuvers as the Pan/Linger/Pan or the Pan-to-the-Right, Get-Distracted, Pan-Back-to-the-Left.

  • If you're especially gifted with your camcorder, remember that you can also pan and zoom simultaneously . This, too, should be considered a special effect used rarely. But when you are, infact, filming a closeup of somebody saying, "Look! The top of the building is exploding!" nothing is more effective than a smooth zoom out/pan up to the top of the building.

  • Practice the pan, tilt, or zoom a couple of times before rolling tape. Each time, the result will be smoother and less noticeable.

  • Be careful about panning when your camcorder's electronic image stabilizer (page 23) is turned on. If you're doing a slow pan when the camcorder is on a tripod (as it should be), the shot gets jittery and jumpy as the camera tries to hold onto (or "stabilize") one scene as you rotate a new one into view. If your camcorder is on a tripod, it's safe for you to turn off the electronic stabilization anyway. ( Optical stabilization doesn't exhibit this problem.)


Tip: If you plan to save your finished iMovie work as a QuickTime moviea file that plays on your computer screen, rather than a tape that will play on your TV (see Part 3)panning and zooming slowly and smoothly is especially important. iMovie's compression software works by analyzing the subtle picture differences from one frame to another; if you zoom or pan too quickly, the QuickTime compressors won't understand the relationship between one frame and the next. Blotchiness or skipped frames (which cause jerky motion) may result in the finished QuickTime movie.


iMovie HD & iDVD 5. The Missing Manual
iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596100337
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 209
Authors: David Pogue

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