Blackmagic Forum

On the Edit Page.
The Viewer has a dropdown showing

Transform
Crop
Dynamic Zoom
OpenFX Overlay
...etc

Select the first tool, Transform
in the Inspector
Enable automatic keyframe creation on Position X,Y
In the Viewer, use the Transform rectangle to affect the Position X,Y values.
Move the play head to another location on the timeline
Move the Transform tool again (affecting Position X,Y)
A red line with hollow circles appears which connects the current transform position with the previous keyframe.
One end of the line is current, the other end is previous.
If you click on previous dot, it moves the play head to that timestamp.
The more keyframes you create, the more lines get connected in a tangled web.
The keyframes aren't limited to the current clip only it will show keyframes on all clips simultaneously.
After creating a couple of keyframes the lines and dots all over the Viewer make it unusable in short order.

With all do respect. Before you start calling things bugs, you should really start to get yourself educated about the basics of keyframing and animations.

Editing Effects and Transitions | Chapter 53 Keyframing Effects in the Edit Page

"Each keyframed change to the Position X and Y parameters creates a control point on the surface of the motion path, which is linear by default, creating a sharp edge. However, you can right-click any control point and choose Smooth from the contextual menu to add Bezier handles to that control point, which let you change the sharp angle to an adjustable curve.

The control points making up any motion path can be dragged around at will to change the path the selected clip will travel. Dots on the surface of the motion path indicate the velocity of motion; dots that are closer together indicate slower motion, while dots that are farther apart indicate faster motion. Dragging a motion path control point farther away from another one will speed up the animation between both points, while dragging it closer will slow the animation down, as you’re setting up the selected clip to travel a longer or shorter distance within the same keyframed time.

You can also adjust the shape of any control point’s curve by clicking to select that control point, which exposes its Bezier handles, and then dragging the handles to adjust its curve. Once handles have been exposed, there are a variety of methods you can use to adjust them and manipulate the motion path.

Finally, you can adjust the acceleration of motion by adjusting the Acceleration handle on the stem
of any Bezier curve. Dragging an acceleration handle towards a control point creates an eased keyframe, where motion slows to a stop, or begins from a stop. Dragging an acceleration handle away from a control point creates more linear motion, where the object moves continuously through that control point.

You can use keyframes directly in the the Timeline, or if you need to do more complicated keyframe editing than the relatively simple controls of the Inspector and Timeline allow, you can use the Keyframe tracks and Curve Editor found in the Edit Timeline. When one or more clip parameters are keyframed, two small buttons appear at the far right of a clip’s name bar in the Timeline, a Curve button and a Keyframe button. These buttons let you access specialized keyframe editors that serve different purposes."

KrunoSmithy wrote:With all do respect. Before you start calling things bugs, you should really start to get yourself educated about the basics of keyframing and animations.

No problem, I deleted calling it a bug.
This tool is very confusing and hard to use for panning and zooming in a straightforward way.
I apologize that it does not seem like a basic video edit tool.
I wish there was one, where you can use the Viewer with an overlay that lets you pan and zoom, without it covering the entire screen with breadcrumbs.
I even tried using it for it's intended purpose, because I intuited that functionality.
But there are so many line and control points that appear, i literally cannot even see the video content under it all. It's like a birds nest.

The easiest way to pan and zoom is to use dynamic zoom, which also comes with panning presets, keyframe presets and same is for zooming, which is its name, but its also a panning and zooming tool. Super easy to use. Especially on the cut page.

If you wanted to move something in the edit page with transform controls, it could not be easier if it tried. You click on a keyframe, you move the thing, it makes a keyframe for you and does interpolation.

Keyframe editor and curves allows for fine tuning it and are able to give you control you would normally need.

Transform overlay controls on the viewer are there for a) another way to work by using controls on the screen and to give visual representation of what is happening. and b) to give you control over position of the path itself, in a way that you can't from keyframe editor or inspector. Same as it is in fusion.

You don't have to use it to make adjustments, but if you needed to or wanted to you can zoom in or use combination of avilable tools to move things, which will only be represented visually on screen. If you want some kind of wild crazy animation, use fusion. For everything else, there is more than enough tools there for you if you are using it correctly.

KrunoSmithy wrote:The easiest way to pan and zoom is to use dynamic zoom, which also comes with panning presets, keyframe presets and same is for zooming, which is its name, but its also a panning and zooming tool. Super easy to use. Especially on the cut page.

I'm using it to follow a very active subject moving through a scene with a lot of direction changes.
It's much easier for me to center on the subject, zoom. Create a keyframe. Select another time and zoom, center, create key frame. Auto zoom effect is too much structure.

KrunoSmithy wrote:If you wanted to move something in the edit page with transform controls, it could not be easier if it tried. You click on a keyframe, you move the thing, it makes a keyframe for you and does interpolation.

The problem I am having, is that I want to use the Transform Overlay.
But it becomes so cluttered with Red Lines, that I cannot see what I am doing.

I don't want wild and crazy anything. Just dead simple centering a subject and zooming in. Create keyframe. Repeat. It's easier to do with the mouse X/Y rather than moving the Position X, then Position Y.

ebrister wrote:The problem I am having, is that I want to use the Transform Overlay.But it becomes so cluttered with Red Lines, that I cannot see what I am doing.I don't want wild and crazy anything. Just dead simple centering a subject and zooming in. Create keyframe. Repeat. It's easier to do with the mouse X/Y rather than moving the Position X, then Position Y.

Sounds like you are shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. Why do you have so many adjustments in the first place? Couldn't you track something if its moves that much? And if you are animating something frame by frame, use appropriate tools for that as well.

KrunoSmithy wrote:

ebrister wrote:The problem I am having, is that I want to use the Transform Overlay.But it becomes so cluttered with Red Lines, that I cannot see what I am doing.I don't want wild and crazy anything. Just dead simple centering a subject and zooming in. Create keyframe. Repeat. It's easier to do with the mouse X/Y rather than moving the Position X, then Position Y.

Sounds like you are shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. Why do you have so many adjustments in the first place? Couldn't you track something if its moves that much? And if you are animating something frame by frame, use appropriate tools for that as well.

I have that many adjustments because that's what I'm doing. Tracking doesn't work, because line of sight breaks, and the orientation of the subject changes. So, don't question what I'm doing. If the tool is designed for a more narrow purpose, then I can understand that. I wish there was a way to hide the vectors and still be able to transform with a mouse.

ebrister wrote:I have that many adjustments because that's what I'm doing. Tracking doesn't work, because line of sight breaks, and the orientation of the subject changes. So, don't question what I'm doing. If the tool is designed for a more narrow purpose, then I can understand that. I wish there was a way to hide the vectors and still be able to transform with a mouse.

Tracking probably doesn't work the way you use it, but I would imagine that tracking itself is not broken, and probably what you were doing could be done better to track this subject. I don't know what it is, you haven't shown anything, but tracking complicated movement with occlusions is something it has been done before. I can't not to question what you are doing, because your skill level with transform tools is not very impressive. It leaves lot of doubt about your tracking skills.

The tools have a design for a particular purpose yes, but skill of the user is X factor. Ordinary writing pen is design to do something, but you can do a lot more with it than designer intended, if you have the skills.

You can use the numbers and you can use the sliders in the inspector panel, and you can zoom in the viewer to get a pretty good look of precise changes. I can only conclude you are doing something terribly wrong in your process.

Normally I would do this in fusion, but for sake of argument, look how far I can zoom in to make a change with mouse on screen in the edit page. Not to mention doing it with numbers. You can be almost as precise as you want, if you have the patience for it. Or you can just do it in a better way. With tracking or in fusion.

KrunoSmithy wrote:Tracking probably doesn't work the way you use it, but I would imagine that tracking itself is not broken, and probably what you were doing could be done better to track this subject. I don't know what it is, you haven't shown anything, but tracking complicated movement with occlusions is something it has been done before. I can't not to question what you are doing, because your skill level with transform tools is not very impressive. It leaves lot of doubt about your tracking skills.

Tracking doesn't work because my source material is hours long and I don't have a supercomputer.
I have a very efficient and effective way of manually centering and zooming that I am quite satisfied with. Except there is a lack of tool support.
Your statement about that I have no skill with Transform Tools does not acknowledge that the functionality provided doesn't work well for me. Because I don't need splines in a mouse X-Y input tool. That should be optional.

You keep talking about how the tools don't work well or don't work for you, but you provide virtually no proper information about what it is that you are doing, so I have no way to judge other than your own statements, which are more negative about the tools, than impressive display of skill. Since you are reluctant to share what is actually the thing you need to do, I can only judge you based on your statements regarding use of tools. Question is? Is your goal to solve a problem or to complain about the tools? If your goal is to solve a problem, share relevant information and I'll be happy to try to find a better way to help you out. If your goal is to complain about the tools that don't work for whatever you decided to do, tell me so I don't waste time trying to help someone who has a different goal than practical solution to a problem.

Yes, you discovered or run into a bug in a tool. Happens all the time. Bugs get fixed. Most tools work well. Should not prevent someone from finding a workaround if he wanted to.

KrunoSmithy wrote:You keep talking about how the tools don't work well or don't work for you, but you provide virtually no proper information about what it is that you are doing, so I have no way to judge other than your own statements, which are more negative about the tools, than impressive display of skill. Since you are reluctant to share what is actually the thing you need to do, I can only judge you based on your statements regarding use of tools. Question is? Is your goal to solve a problem or to complain about the tools? If your goal is to solve a problem, share relevant information and I'll be happy to try to find a better way to help you out. If your goal is to complain about the tools that don't work for whatever you decided to do, tell me so I don't waste time trying to help someone who has a different goal than practical solution to a problem.

I have zero time to hang around complaining about tools for no reason.
I am trying to produce videos of ice skating performances that have hundreds of people on the ice milling around randomly getting in the way of the camera. The performer is changing direction, position, arms & legs, head different every second.
There is nothing to lock onto with automated tracking. No two frames look the same. The videos are long. 4K 60fps. There is an element of artistic control that's needed in the framing as well. It's not just tracking a phone across an office.

Here is exactly what I'm doing. You can see in this example, I was stuck with Anchor Points with linear interpolation. It would look way better with smoothing. Not that many extra people in this one.

ebrister wrote:I have zero time to hang around complaining about tools for no reason.I am trying to produce videos of ice skating performances that have hundreds of people on the ice milling around randomly getting in the way of the camera. The performer is changing direction, position, arms & legs, head different every second.
There is nothing to lock onto with automated tracking. No two frames look the same. The videos are long. 4K 60fps. There is an element of artistic control that's needed in the framing as well. It's not just tracking a phone across an office. Does that help?

The link you posted for video on youtiube is not working. Usually it happens when youtube has .be at the end, instead of .com. For some reason this forum does not play well with youtube clips.

What are you trying to do ? Frame the shot or something else? If its something relating to VFX that would depend on the kind of VFX you need, but the are methods to track and even roto if you had to. If you only need framing, that is easier. I don't know how the video looks or what it is, so I can't speak of specifics but if only framing you need and its a long video there are methods you could use to at least automate some of it.

Also, depending on what you are doing there are many ways to optimize performance and still get good enough quality picture for tracking and other tools. Two things you can try is lowering timeline resolution for the time of working on it, and the other is Timeline playback resolution which will reduce only the quality in the viewer, not do anything to the footage. With a 4K video usually reducing to half at 2K is great compromise of quality and speed, but you might even go lower. You can make proxies or cache the clips as well. You can select things based on color or tone and use that for tracking. There are many techniques and tools that can be used.

But one thing I would try and see how it works is smart reframe option. It should track most things and its pretty fast, and you can control it by manual framing. All it does is makes keyframes for you using existing transform controls, so you can adjust it later if you need to.

ebrister wrote:I have zero time to hang around complaining about tools for no reason.

The folks on this forum have a lot of experience and they're trying to understand what you need so they can tell you the best way to do it. Their advice is worth listening to. If you've really got hours of footage to deal with then an investment in time to learn how a better tool works is going to be more than repaid with time saved.

By the way, you don't NEED to use the control overlays with the Transform tool, you can right-click on the little red "keyframe" diamond in the inspector panel and select "Ease In", "Ease Out" or "Ease In and Out" to get a less sharp transition between movements. Not as much control as with the viewer overlays, but less cluttered if you've got a lot of control points.

Another option to consider is to use the Transform tool in Fusion. Fusion has a proper keyframe and spline editor that makes this sort of thing a lot easier to deal with. You can literally add all your control points first, then select them all in the spline graph and hit Shift-S to "smooth" them.

Sean Nelson wrote:

ebrister wrote:I have zero time to hang around complaining about tools for no reason.

The folks on this forum have a lot of experience and they're trying to understand what you need so they can tell you the best way to do it. Their advice is worth listening to. If you've really got hours of footage to deal with then an investment in time to learn how a better tool works is going to be more than repaid with time saved.

You are not responding to what I said. I said I DON'T have time to complain for no reason.
In response to the idea that I was hanging around hoping to file a bug and get famous or something.
I'm running into actual deficiencies and bugs in the area that I'm trying to work with.
Which involves tracking a subject that is never looking the same twice from second to second, while a lot of random people are in the way, and also tracking zoom distance. in 4K 60fps with hours of footage.
All I want to do is manually center and zoom on my video. That is the Anchor Point and Zoom.
Unfortunately, the Transform tool is cluttered and the Anchor points have a math error when you ease in.
I'm not jumping to some AI solution, it's just not happening.

ebrister wrote:You are not responding to what I said.

I updated my post, probably while you were entering this one. Take another look at it for a couple of suggestions.

ebrister wrote:Here is exactly what I'm doing. You can see in this example, I was stuck with Anchor Points with linear interpolation. It would look way better with smoothing. Not that many extra people in this one.

I was able to see the video, but for whatever bizarre and quite frustrating reason, you seem to think we can read minds. What are you doing exactly? Framing the video? What is the deliverable timeline, are you zooming in, cropping, what? I don't know if that is the finished video or one you need to work on or what. I don't "exactly" see what you are doing, and you are not telling.

Either way, since you don't want any kind of actual tracking or AI and you want to do it manually, the best thing is fusion for this kind of work. You should be able to optimize playback with various existing solutions if you wanted to.

For the record, I don't know who originally shot this footage and though they will frame it in post, but that was a really, really bad idea. Manner in which it was shot and length of footage are problems that are not post production friendly. And on top of that it seems to be fairly mandated performance of people ice skating, and not some once-in-a-lifetime money shot. So what is the calculation here to make this worth the effort, I do not know. Enhance is in post, yes. Fix it in post. Bad idea.

Either way. Wish you luck.

KrunoSmithy wrote:

ebrister wrote:Here is exactly what I'm doing. You can see in this example, I was stuck with Anchor Points with linear interpolation. It would look way better with smoothing. Not that many extra people in this one.

I was able to see the video, but for whatever bizarre and quite frustrating reason, you seem to think we can read minds. What are you doing exactly? Framing the video? What is the deliverable timeline, are you zooming in, cropping, what? I don't know if that is the finished video or one you need to work on or what. I don't "exactly" see what you are doing, and you are not telling.

Either way, since you don't want any kind of actual tracking or AI and you want to do it manually, the best thing is fusion for this kind of work. You should be able to optimize playback with various existing solutions if you wanted to.

For the record, I don't know who originally shot this footage and though they will frame it in post, but that was a really, really bad idea. Manner in which it was shot and length of footage are problems that are not post production friendly. And on top of that it seems to be fairly mandated performance of people ice skating, and not some once-in-a-lifetime money shot. So what is the calculation here to make this worth the effort, I do not know. Enhance is in post, yes. Fix it in post. Bad idea.

Either way. Wish you luck.

It's fine, I understand the disconnect.
This is HOBBY videography. Shot on a locked down phone.
Using post production to zoom in.
The field of view of the 4k is being used to capture the entire horizontal space which is something like 20'.
But it's fine for my purposes. It doesn't matter that it is grainy, etc. It is what it is.
Consider it a rough draft.
Nevertheless, the tool I'm using is Davinci, and it's mostly perfect for what I need it for.
There are some legitimate issues that I raised, that are not due to being inexperienced.
1. Being able to use the mouse to set X/Y coordinates, without every historical data entry getting stacked on it.
2. The fact that smoothing doesn't work on Anchor Points
3. The fact that Anchor Points aren't represented in the Timeline keyframe spline editor.

ebrister wrote:There are some legitimate issues that I raised, that are not due to being inexperienced.
1. Being able to use the mouse to set X/Y coordinates, without every historical data entry getting stacked on it.
2. The fact that smoothing doesn't work on Anchor Points
3. The fact that Anchor Points aren't represented in the Timeline keyframe spline editor.

My work colleagues used to call me the "workaround king" because when we ran into some sort of software issue I'd always try to find a way to work around it rather than fix the source of the problem if the initial investigation suggested that the fix was going to be difficult or time-consuming.

And it's from this perspective that I'd suggest that railing against the shortcomings of the keyframing capabilities of the Edit page isn't very productive. People have been complaining about various aspects of Edit page keyframing for the 3 or 4 years that I've been on this forum and it's very unlikely that anything is going to change within the timeframe of your project. The Edit page's forte is putting clips together on a timeline, and while it can do basic animation my experience is that it gets pretty cumbersome when you try to do too much with it.

My advice would be to go to Fusion, which has much better animation tools. Fusion isn't going to solve your bullet point 1 above, because the on-screen controls for a clip include all of the keyframes for the clip. But it solves bullet points 2 and 3. The Transform tool in Fusion calls the Edit page's "Anchor" parameter "Pivot", but it's the same thing and keyframing the Pivot parameter is fully editable in Fusion's keyframe and spline panes. And the spline pane makes smoothing all of the control points in a path (be they zoom, pivot, or whatever) really easy by selecting all of them and hitting "Shift+S" to smooth. Or you can use Bezier handles to customize the smoothing any way you want.

As for bullet point number 1, when I have an animation path that's overlapping and very complex (for example, the path produced by the Tracker tool in Fusion which generates a keyframe for every frame in the clip), if I need to go in and manipulate points in the path the main difficulty is in managing to get the mouse to click on the correct point when so many of them are clustered together. Fusion helps in this because it has two viewer panes (three if you're using the Studio version's Video Clean Feed). What this means is that you can have the full frame view in one pane and then zoom in ridiculously far on the other pane. I have yet to find a path that I couldn't zoom in far enough to so that I could easily select the one point I was interested in. And when you grab the point you can see the end result in the other viewer window as you move the mouse around.

I really think Fusion would be a much better tool for you to use for what you're trying to do. That's why I made the comment above that a bit of time spent in learning the right tool will pay off in time and frustration saved by not having to deal with the wrong tool.

Workarounds are called work-arounds for a reason: there is an obstruction. Obstructions are worth removing.

Sean Nelson wrote:

ebrister wrote:There are some legitimate issues that I raised, that are not due to being inexperienced.
1. Being able to use the mouse to set X/Y coordinates, without every historical data entry getting stacked on it.
2. The fact that smoothing doesn't work on Anchor Points
3. The fact that Anchor Points aren't represented in the Timeline keyframe spline editor.

My work colleagues used to call me the "workaround king" because when we ran into some sort of software issue I'd always try to find a way to work around it rather than fix the source of the problem if the initial investigation suggested that the fix was going to be difficult or time-consuming.

And it's from this perspective that I'd suggest that railing against the shortcomings of the keyframing capabilities of the Edit page isn't very productive. People have been complaining about various aspects of Edit page keyframing for the 3 or 4 years that I've been on this forum and it's very unlikely that anything is going to change within the timeframe of your project. The Edit page's forte is putting clips together on a timeline, and while it can do basic animation my experience is that it gets pretty cumbersome when you try to do too much with it.

My advice would be to go to Fusion, which has much better animation tools. Fusion isn't going to solve your bullet point 1 above, because the on-screen controls for a clip include all of the keyframes for the clip. But it solves bullet points 2 and 3. The Transform tool in Fusion calls the Edit page's "Anchor" parameter "Pivot", but it's the same thing and keyframing the Pivot parameter is fully editable in Fusion's keyframe and spline panes. And the spline pane makes smoothing all of the control points in a path (be they zoom, pivot, or whatever) really easy by selecting all of them and hitting "Shift+S" to smooth. Or you can use Bezier handles to customize the smoothing any way you want.

As for bullet point number 1, when I have an animation path that's overlapping and very complex (for example, the path produced by the Tracker tool in Fusion which generates a keyframe for every frame in the clip), if I need to go in and manipulate points in the path the main difficulty is in managing to get the mouse to click on the correct point when so many of them are clustered together. Fusion helps in this because it has two viewer panes (three if you're using the Studio version's Video Clean Feed). What this means is that you can have the full frame view in one pane and then zoom in ridiculously far on the other pane. I have yet to find a path that I couldn't zoom in far enough to so that I could easily select the one point I was interested in. And when you grab the point you can see the end result in the other viewer window as you move the mouse around.

I really think Fusion would be a much better tool for you to use for what you're trying to do. That's why I made the comment above that a bit of time spent in learning the right tool will pay off in time and frustration saved by not having to deal with the wrong tool.

I'm already doing workarounds. I find them interfering with my productivity for such a simple task.
The tools were put there on the Edit Page for a reason.
I am raising the issue so there is visibility.
If I don't say anything, the status quo will prevail and people will say, I guess people didn't mind using workarounds instead.

Sean Nelson wrote:if I need to go in and manipulate points in the path the main difficulty is in managing to get the mouse to click on the correct point when so many of them are clustered together. Fusion helps in this because it has two viewer panes (three if you're using the Studio version's Video Clean Feed). What this means is that you can have the full frame view in one pane and then zoom in ridiculously far on the other pane. I have yet to find a path that I couldn't zoom in far enough to so that I could easily select the one point I was interested in. And when you grab the point you can see the end result in the other viewer window as you move the mouse around.

I'm not trying to manipulate points at all. I'm trying to use the Transform tool because it has mouse X/Y input capability. It also has keyframes superimposed on it, which I don't need or want.
When you use the same Transform overlay tool to input Anchor Points instead of Position, it does exactly what I want (it doesn't display the red lines in the Viewer).
But now were back to->Anchor Points can't be smoothed. Fusion has too much performance overhead, and is not in the same area that I'm doing the editing.
It's overkill for what I need. I don't need a powerful FX design environment. I just need what the Edit page has.

I tried using Fusion and FPS went from 60 to 24 when using the Transform tool.
Which makes playback look exactly like slow motion. Not usable.
I have no issues whatsoever with playback on the Edit page.
My source is 4K 60fps.
1 to 2 hours in duration.
I don't want to micromanage caching 2 hour long content as a workaround.

ebrister wrote:I tried using Fusion and FPS went from 60 to 24 when using the Transform tool.
Which makes playback look exactly like slow motion. Not usable.
I have no issues whatsoever with playback on the Edit page.
My source is 4K 60fps.
1 to 2 hours in duration.
I don't want to micromanage caching 2 hour long content as a workaround.

I don't know what your timeline format is. Fusion page by default references footage from timeline, but sources is from media pool at full resolution. Depending on how you set up your workflow this may be or may not be what you want, usually it is. Either way, if you need to work with transform tool for the sake of framing, use Timeline Playback Resolution of half or quarter which will only affect the preview in the viewer, and the image will be in draft mode.

Similar to taking a screenshot, and resizing the image. No caching of files to disk is needed, its easy to go back and forth, and it should prioritize playback speed at expense of quality, but since quality is not that important if you want to do loose framing of shots, but you want playback speed, that is how you would go about it. Although trying to manually frame 1 to 2 hours of footage at 4K 60 fps, is not something I would do, if you are that focused on it. Its the way you can get better playback performance with no cashing to disk. Ideally you would use fusion studio, but with smartphone compressed footage of probably variable frame rate, you are not in great place there either.

KrunoSmithy wrote:...Although trying to manually frame 1 to 2 hours of footage at 4K 60 fps, is not something I would do,

I don't use all the footage in the final. I scrub and edit, and it all works fine in the Editor.
I use a TourBox NEO and it is quite effective for scrubbing, cutting, deleting, zooming the timeline.
Then I use the transform tools on the same page for panning an zooming, as well as manipulating the keyframes.
Getting out of this pattern and into a different UI context is not what I'm interested in.

KrunoSmithy wrote:use Timeline Playback Resolution of half or quarter which will only affect the preview in the viewer, and the image will be in draft mode.

It is at quarter.

I'm running a 3060 by the way.
It was the only thing I could afford that had enough VRAM for 4K.
I was intending to just hang out on the Edit page, because performance was perfect there.

ebrister wrote:I am raising the issue so there is visibility.
If I don't say anything, the status quo will prevail and people will say, I guess people didn't mind using workarounds instead.

OK. Well I guess it would have been nice to know that at the start before we spent so much time trying to help...

Sean Nelson wrote:

ebrister wrote:I am raising the issue so there is visibility.
If I don't say anything, the status quo will prevail and people will say, I guess people didn't mind using workarounds instead.

OK. Well I guess it would have been nice to know that at the start before we spent so much time trying to help...

Am I posting in the wrong forum?

ebrister wrote:...There are some legitimate issues that I raised, that are not due to being inexperienced.
1. Being able to use the mouse to set X/Y coordinates, without every historical data entry getting stacked on it.
2. The fact that smoothing doesn't work on Anchor Points
3. The fact that Anchor Points aren't represented in the Timeline keyframe spline editor....

Am I posting in the wrong forum?

Nope - you have raised serious impediments to performing smooth manual reframing of your subject. These have been raised before and it doesn't hurt to raise them again.

Your use case with such long clips is somewhat unusual. It wouldn't be ideal for Fusion and, honestly, it's not really ideal for the inspector in the Edit page, either, at least not while viewing the position spline since that spline (as you report) will become rather unwieldy.

Steve Alexander wrote:it's not really ideal for the inspector in the Edit page, either, at least not while viewing the position spline since that spline (as you report) will become rather unwieldy.

It's awesome and butter on the Edit page, including with the Inspector.
My complaint is that there is not a Mouse X/Y input for Anchor Points and Position that doesn't overlay keyframe splines over the thing you're looking at.
Zooming into a static shot is the only reasonable way for me to capture this material.
I don't know why it's never been attempted before. Sometimes that's all you have to work with.