Animating stills into video project program options

Question

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Dear experts:
I just acquired PE7 on the assumption that it was a sophisticated program that allowed me to integrate/edit  stills into my video footage to create a complete dvd and boy was I dissapointed to find that I cannot even pan a still like the simpler and free Windows Movie Maker that came with my machine. I create "Ken Burns" type documentaries that have a lot of stills and live video footage and now I am stuck.
Can someone advise as to the best way to accomplish this like?:
A. Create the documentary animated stills in another program and copy them into PE7 (or make a dvd first ? Which program is best for this?
B Is there another Adobe program out there that does both full video and animated stills to create a full dvd?
Please advise.
Thanks in advance,
Tom

Answer 1

Here's some more links that might help. Some of these links are for prior versions of PRE, or for Premiere Pro, so the menu items and whatnot might not be exactly the same as PRE7, but the concepts are the same and generally the features just move around from version to version.
http://premiere.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=37610
http://www.elementsvillage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50530
http://muvipix.com/products.php?subcat_id=41
http://videoinasnap.chuckengels.com/source/steve/steve_tips_01-06.htm
http://millie.furman.edu/mll/tutorials/premiere/premiere2effects.pdf
Basically, if you
Right click on your image in the Timeline, and select Show Properties, it will open the Properties panel.
Click on the triangle next to "Motion" to display the details for the Motion effects. "Postion" controls where on the screen your image is; "Scale" controls the "zoom" on your image as a percentage of normal (100=normal scale, 50=half size)
For discussion sake, let's say your image is 4 seconds long.
You change the Scale to 50. If you do a preview, you can see the image is half-size for the entire 4 seconds. But let's say you want the image to start at half-size, but end at full-size. In other words, start a half size and zoom in until it's full size.
That's where keyframes come in.
So click the "Toggle Animation" button. This will open a mini timeline. This timeline represents the 4 seconds of your clip.
Put a keyframe at the very beginning (move the red line as far left as it will go, click the diamond icon). Change the Scale to 50.
This tells PRE that at the beginning of the clip, you want the scale to be 50.
Next, move the red line as far right as it will go. Click the diamond again to set another keyframe. Set the Scale to 100.
This tells PRE that at the end of the clip, you want the scale to be 100.
That's it. PRE will calculate all the "in between" values. You can actually see this in action by moving the red line back and forth. If you position the red line exactly at 2 seconds, you'll see PRE has computed the value as 75. Magic, eh?
To get fancier, you could
add a keyframe at 2 seconds, make its value 100, and
change the ending keyframe's value to 50.
This would make PRE start at half size, zoom to full size, and zoom back out to half size.
Hopefully that will give you an idea of what keyframes do. I was really intimidated by them at first, but after playing around a little, I found them incredibly powerful and actually much easier to use than I thought.
By the way, changing the Scale causes your image to zoom in and out. If you change the Position values, you can cause your image to move - changing the horizontal values only can move it move left to right (or vice versa), vertical values to move up and down.
By changing the Position *and* Scale, you could make your image pan left-to-right *and* zoom in.
By changing Position *and* Scale *and* Rotation, you could make it pan left-to-right, zoom in, and spin around. Which would probably make you throw up, but it gives you an idea of what keyframes can do.
Other keyframe tips:
The left and right triangles surrounding the diamond allow you to move back and forth between established keyframes
If you turn animation off after you've set keyframes, it will erase all of your keyframes (after asking you, of course). This can be a good thing or bad thing, depending...
If you type a new value in a property, it will automatically add a keyframe whereever the red line is (that is, the red line in the keyframe panel next to the properties, not the red line in the Timeline).
After keyframes are placed, you can move them by dragging them.