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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiWYN1eRkeY (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiWYN1eRkeY)

A new Burning Ship deep zoom showcasing Panzerboy/CommandLineCowboy's new smooth shading plugin for Fractal Extreme using a palette of my own, I find simple palette's work the best with this.

Hope you enjoy.

Did you use a bailout of 2 for artistic effect?
A bailout of 4 would give a completely smooth blend of colours.
That's in the advanced settings dialog, Overflow Point.

The slowdown at the end appears to be by video manipulation?
You can achieve the same thing much smoother by creating a filename.fxz.config text file in the movies folder.
Then clicking the 'Custom Zoom' tick box in the 'save as avi' dialog.
Bruce Dawson explains the use on his blog http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/fractal-extreme-new-versionbetter-zoom-movies/
An example of how I've used its is below


I assume a zoom speed of 1 means 1 zoom per second.
You may be able to set the fromzoom and tozoom to the same number.
That way you've created 'way-points' to tell Fractal Extreme what speed to be at a certain zoom level.
Fractal Extreme will gradually interpolate the zoom speed between these fixed points, giving an
almost imperceptible slow down.

Thanks for the tip regarding the bailout value, I remember reading that in your initial description but couldn't find that setting in the options, didn't know it's the same thing as "Overflow Point".

yeah, the ending was slowed down artificially in Premier, it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. I have played around with the custom zoom option but I get lost when I go to export it to an avi since it then asks for "frames per zoom". I usually already have a song in mind when I'm satisfied enough with a zoom that I want to export it and I try to match the length of the zoom with the length of the song as close as possible so I don't have to adjust anything manually in premier. If I assume 1 zoom per second is equivalent to 30 frames per zoom at 30 fps then I could probably work it out, thanks for the example code. In the past, I have achieved the same results by exporting the movie with a high frames per zoom and then speeding up the less interesting parts in premier, that seems to introduce less video artifacts but understandably results in much larger intermediate video files.

My dream plugin for Premier/FX would be one that lets me import a FX zoom movie directly into premier (or another equivalent video editing software) but I'm not holding my breath for that.

There seems to be a lot of video artifacts in the slowed down section, perhaps because Premier was working on already compressed video?
I use the 'full frames' codec (compressor in setup from 'save as avi' dialog) when I make multiple zoom movies and layer them together with Virtualdub.
That's not as good as directly importing into premier but at least prevents any compression artifacts doubling up.

I agree the config files make it pretty much impossible to match to a known piece of music.
I'd have preferred a system when you specify waypoints, eg at 49.0833s be at zoom position 55.25 and then have FX work out
what accelerations needed to achieve that. The code to achieve that would quite a bit more complicated.

I'm actually using the Lagarith lossless video codec for exports http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html (http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html) , this codec allows for much smaller file sizes than using the full frames option with no quality loss, it's actually designed for editing and is compatible with most video editors. It's the best option I have found, highly recommended.

The artifacts are likely due to Premiers horrible handling of almost anything that isn't live action footage, I'm using an older version (pro 2.0), so maybe this is handled better in the newer versions like CS5+. It's actually not as bad in my original AVI (~800MB), Youtube's re compression made it much worse.