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Inspired by the amazingly deep work of teamfresh, I threw together this (no so deep) 3D zoom.

Thanks for watching!

http://www.browngrafix.com/trip-to-1358e9

Hi Kam -

Yeah, I suppose it does sound a bit vague and convoluted.  I think I tried to explain the solution without really explaining the problem.  Sorry about that.  That's what happens when you mix alcohol with a keyboard.

The problem that I was trying to address was how to avoid the loss of quality incurred when modifying the rate of speed of a video clip (especially digitally created clips).  I use Premiere and a handful of other popular video editors and have experienced similar problems with all of them when attempting to synch video to audio by rate-stretching.  Squeezing or stretching a clip always seems to create a "blurred" effect as the editor removes and/or interpolates the frames to the new length.  For example, segment 1:08 to 1:12 in My Little Boxed Garden (http://www.fractalforums.com/movies-showcase-(rate-my-movie)/my-little-boxed-garden/) was squeezed down about 3 or 4 hundred percent in order to speed up the "growth" of the plants.  I know it's a little hard to tell, but that segment of the video is blurred.

It's entirely possible that I'm just ignorant of a simple solution within Premiere itself, but the work-around that I came up with was to avoid rate-stretching within the editor entirely.  Since there's currently no direct audio keyframing function in MB3D, that meant either (1) carefully planning out the animation keyframes in advance with the audio in mind or (2) coming up with a different solution.  I went with (2).  My alternate solution was to render the entire animation at a somewhat slow 200 frames between keyframes.  For this animation, the final result was a little over 21000 frames rendered.  I then wrote a batch file that would copy frames from that original batch of 21000 frames into another folder at whatever step rate I desired (i.e., copy every 5th frame, 10th frame, or whatever).  This allowed me to effectively create crisp, untouched 3X, 5X, 10X, 15X, and 30X versions of the original animation.  I then patched together these different versions as needed in Premiere to vary the video speed with the audio beat.  As noted in my blog post, the final number of frames that were actually used was around 3000.

Unfortunately, even without alcohol I may still not be explaining this clearly.  I do hope you got the gist of it though.

Truman