Premiere has 36 filters for your experimental pleasure. You can see what's available by pulling down the Clip menu and choosing Filters.

Many of the filters are similar to effects available in Photoshop: blurs, altering colors, brightness and contrast, distortion, and lighting effects of various kinds. While we will not cover any other filter but the Image Pan here, explore these tools when you have the time. Remember, however, that many a good story can get lost in the gadgetry of special effects: use them sparingly and when appropriately rationalized by the content of your project.

From our storyboard we knew we wanted to end with a tight focus on Massimo, so we set that up first. See the handles at each corner of the end image. Holding down the Shift key, we clicked and dragged one corner in to make the rectangle smaller. We released the mouse button, then put the cursor in the center and moved the rectangle over Massimo's head and shoulders.

We hold down the Shift key to keep the 4 x 3 proportions. Premiere will let you resize the image however you like, but if it isn't some multiple of 4 x 3, the resized image will be distorted as Premiere tries to cram it into its customary size. Try it for yourself and see.

Now we have an endpoint for our pan, but the effect is more a zoom in on Massimo than a steady pan across the children. To pan across the children's faces to Massimo's face, we changed the size of the starting image. We aligned the top of the start image with the top of the end image, both at 33 pixels from the top. Moving the top of the image down meant that we had to crop the image a bit, but we used the Shift key again so the proportions could be preserved.

We wanted to hold the pan over Massimo for about a second. As you can see, there are no settings that will hold the end image in place. It's one smooth pan from start to end. To get the hold effect, we copied the filtered image (select the image in the Construction Window and Copy), then pasted it into the Construction Window immediately after the first clip. We opened up the Image Pan window for the second clip and pressed the <<Copy<< (Copy End to Start) button. That copied the settings of the end image onto the start image, meaning that the image will not move at all for as long as we choose to use the clip. We set the duration of the clip to almost a second, and our work was done.

An image pan is an effective way to extend the audience's interest in an image, therefore, it is often used with images intended to be on the screen for at least five to ten seconds. This one is a pretty short pan, barely five seconds. It is good it is not much longer, otherwise the viewer might notice the blurriness of an already sized image. As you are using Image Pan to zoom into a picture that has already been sized, the image can become blurry. Why? The lower resolution image (72 dpi) is meant to be seen on the full screen. When you zoom in, it’s like looking at a newspaper photo with a magnifying glass: all you see are the dots. In our case, you see the pixels.

If you find that your zoomed-in image is too blurry, you can go back and use the original scan, at 150 dpi, so you do not lose the resolution as you zoom in. That 150-dpi image is likely to be larger than 320 x 240 pixels, so you will have to make sure that your start and end images are in the 4 x 3 proportion ratio. Let's look at how the scrolling credits were done using Image Pan. Use these same principles to deal with oversize images in your movie.

The credits title is 320 x 660, as wide as the screen, but more than twice as tall. We typed in the numbers for a rectangle 320 x 240 in the spaces labelled width and height and placed the rectangle at the top of the screen. (Using the Shift key won't work here to make a 4 x 3 ratio image; it only maintains the aspect ratio of the original image, in this case 320 x 600.) We copied the image to the end side, then moved the rectangle to the bottom of the screen. Through experimentation (described in the Titles page), we knew how much empty space to put at the bottom of the page to make Massimo's name just about to clear the screen as the pan ends.

• Return to Adding Special Effects to try other effects
• Compressing and Playing Your Finished Movie