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    Requested Smooth pans and zooms, auto-pans and zooms

    I recently tried the programs Inzomia and Zoom Studio, and found that it is possible on my 733 MHz machine to achieve completely smooth pans and zooms of full screen images in real time with these programs. Ie, the pans and zooms look just about as smooth as what you could achieve with a movie camera. I assume this effect is achieved by maximizing the potential of one's graphics card. (My card is not that new or fancy, but it executed the effects just fine.)

    Until I saw these programs, I'd assumed these kinds of effects weren't even possible in real time. I would love it if IrfanView could implement these kinds of effects.

    In Inzomia, these smooth pans and zooms are controlled by dragging the mouse, and this is nice, but I think it would be cooler to automate these effects after the user performs a single command. For example (ignoring existing key assignments for a moment) CTRL-<right-arrow> might tell IrfanView to start a pan to the right. Then IrfanView would slowly start panning smoothly to the right. The speed of the pan could be set by the user.

    Smooth zooms could be controlled in a similar way.

    With some thought, one could find ways to implement simple commands to initiate pan movements at user-controlled angles(not just left, right, up and down), and smooth zooms to user-set endpoints.

    Ideally, it would be cool to be able to save these smooth pans and zooms with the image so that they could be incorporated into slideshows.

    #2
    You have much fantasy, I must say. Saving smooth pans and zooms with images and incorporate this into slideshows implies a whole new look at the way of slideshow-producing. The slideshow programs I know make use of a sort of database for pan and zoom parameters; the graphic itself stays unaffected. I like your approach to this matter. It's by all means surprising.

    Zooming however is a very intricate thing. It requires finely calculated blurring methodes. Slideshows from other programs then IV allways soften the sharpness of your carefully taken digital photo's. Not so with IV! I prefer sharpness above zoomeffects, so that's why I use IV for making slideshows!

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      #3
      Yes, I have much fantasy! But Zoom Studio already has the ability to save pans and zooms with an image, so that's definitely doable. (Zoom Studio doesn't have a slidehow mode, though.) It definitely suggests exciting new possibilities for slideshow producing (and image viewing), and I think Zoom Studio proves these possibilities are technically achievable.

      With Zoom Studio and Inzomia, it appears that if blurring occurs, it's slight,
      and only while the image is moving. You'd think that once an image stops moving, the image could be displayed without blurring (though perhaps not). In most cases, I would want to zoom into a particular point (such as face) and then pause. During the pause, I'd think the image could be displayed without blurring.

      If a person truly preferred static but totally unblurred images, there could always be an option to turn off smooth zooming, and existing IrfanView zooming functions could be used instead. The same option could be made available in slide shows.

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        #4
        Well, I have taken a look at Zoom Studio and I've got the impression, that this programming is based on Flash techno. I don't think Irfan will fit in such efforts in his program.

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          #5
          Another program that illustrates how cool the effect looks is a small slideshow program called MotionPicture, available at:



          I strongly recommend people check it out.

          The requirements for it are just DirectX and a GeForce2 or better graphics card. Again this suggests it's sparing the CPU by using the graphics card to achieve the effect.

          Apparently the Apple OS X and Windows Vista have built-in screensavers that use this effect.

          The effect is a combined pan and zoom. Unlike Zoom Studio, the pan/zoom in these slideshow viewers is apparently created at random. My original post was suggesting controlling this effect with keyboard commands or perhaps mouse commands. But even with purely random pan/zooms, it's a very nice effect.

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            #6
            By the way, a demo of ZoomStudio is available at:



            Also, I found another screen saver that uses this effect, called Nostalgic:



            I thought I'd elaborate on my earlier suggestion.

            1. Keyboard and/or mouse control of zooms/pans.

            It would be cool to be able to "influence" the direction of a pan or zoom by pressing arrow keys. For example(ignoring current key assignments), pressing <right-arrow> would cause panning to start to the right. The other arrow keys would influence the pans in a similar way. If you pressed <right-arrow> and next <down-arrow>, the image would continue to pan to the right, but also move downwards. Perhaps pressing <left-arrow> would slow the movement to the right, so that movement would then continue straight down. One could also simply stop all movement using a keypress.

            One could also cause increase or decrease zoom speed using keyboard commands.

            These movements could be combined with the kind of automatic movement used in MotionPicture or Nostalgic. Or one could control everything using keyboard/mouse combinations alone.

            One could also find ways to create diagonal movements, perhaps by using mouse clicks. For example to define an angle for panning, you could press CTRL and then just click twice: once for the start point and once for end point. After these two clicks, movement would proceed along the angle defined by this line.

            One could also create zooms to a user defined endpoints by pressing a keyboard combination (such as CTRL-z) and then clicking on a point in the image. The image would zoom towards this point. One could use another command for zooming out.

            All of these commands would create the most controlled, elegant viewing available in any image viewing application that I know of. If you wanted to zoom smoothly into a person's face in a large picture, you could do so, *on-the-fly*, using these features. Or, if you wanted to view a line of people in an image, you could zoom in to one of them, stop, and then smoothly pan along the line of people. You can't do this *smoothly* in any real-time slideshow or viewing application that I know of.

            You can't do this smoothly AND *on-the-fly* in any application whatsoever, as far as I know. Yet user-controlled panning and zooming are available in almost all image viewers--it's just that the the zooms are stepwise and the pans are jerky, because pans and zooms are all done with the CPU, not the graphics card.


            2. Allow keybaord and mouse pan/zooms when image browsing

            Since these operations take place on the fly, there's no reason they shouldn't be available in full-screen mode while you're just browing images.

            3. Recording of controlled pans and zooms to create slideshows

            Zoom Studio is not a slide show creator, but it animates individual images using real-time pan/zoom effects. The difference is that Zoom Studio allows you to control the effects in a precise way. Using keyboard commands, you define where pan/zoom movements will start and end. You can create any number of these effects per image. The animation parameters for the image are then saved in a small file with the image. If you select the image and then select "animate", the pans/zooms you've defined are automatically executed.

            The program suggests how one might go about designing an interface for defining controlled pans and zooms in slideshows.

            The key thing is that the animations you define are displayed in real time. I'm not aware of any slideshow viewer that does this. Because everything is in real time, you don't have to save slideshows as MPG files, as with other programs that use smooth pans/zooms, which means that editing the slideshow is much easier, and thus no loss of image resolution from image compression.

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              #7
              I downloaded and installed ZoomStudio. Looking around the program I've got several error messages about System Volume Information (Access refused). Also, there wasn't a shortcut for zooming in or out. Further more the screen building was bad when I changed several dialogs of program windows off or on. Working in CompuPic Pro (my ?zoom program?) I can zoom in or out with my mousewheel or hotkeys with the same graphical results and quality as ZoomStudio. So... I didn't see the benefits of ZoomStudio. Sorry.

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