Theres no way to animate the camera lens is there? it seems to want to be static and change everything over the whole timeline no matter whn i put a key frame...ive got my camera lens set to like 100mm and im trying to have it move to the base of an object coming up out of the ground then tilt back and reduce to a 28mm lens...it seems if i do renders in pieces i can achieve it, but i cant do it all in one take...

I have done that before, (doing the Hitchcock 'Vertigo' effect, ) and it works fine. Have you checked if your motion is set to 'Expplict' or not? That is the default and is what you need to animate the camera lens. Good luck!

yeah..i kept it on explicit...but when i key frame and change the lens type it changes it for the whole timeline not just from the keyframe...ive been rendering up to that point then changing the lens type and just editing everything together at the end...i ant seem to get it to do it 'dynamically'

OH! Is what you're trying to do is have the shot snap from one "focal length" of the lens to the next focal length immediately? The default tweener on Carrara is a bezier curve, which would make the camera zoom from 100mm to 28mm over the time between key frames. If you want the render to snap from 100mm to 28mm, you'll need to change the tweener to discreet (I think that's the term; I don't have Carrara open in front of me now.) Just double click on the timeline between the keyframes and select the different tweener mode. (There are several -- bezier, linear, oscillate, discreet, maybe another one or two I'm not remembering.) Hope that's helpful! - Dex

yeah discrete is the one that does it immediately...what id like to do is change the lens going from like 100mm to 28mm dynamically over the timeline (sorry if i wasnt clear) but when i make a keyframe and change the lens setting it changes the lens setting for the whole timeline and not just at the point. so if i start with 100mm and at the keyframe change it to 28, the lens is changed to 28 over the whole timeline, which is not what im going for...im trying for what bluetone is talking about but havent been able to achieve it...

Change the lens type/setting?? . . . I just tried it in C2, and changing the lens type (wide, normal, telephoto, zoom) will mess it up- what worked for me was to set it to zoom at the beginning of the animation (1st key frame), and then move the zoom slider. . . have you tried that? Markd

OK, so I did what I think you want to do.... Here's how:

Set Camera 1 go be a zoom camera. Go to the point in the timeline where you want the zoom to start. (In the picture, that's at 10 frames.) Slide the zoom up and release. This creates a keyframe. (Yes, you could click the keyframe icon and do the same thing, but I've always done it this way.) Reset the focal length to the focal length you are starting with. (Default is 50mm.)

Go to the point in the timeline where you want the zoom to finish (in this example that's at 2:00). Set the focal length of the camera to whatever you want. (I zoomed in using this test.)

That's it; your camera should zoom between the first keyframe you set and the second keyframe that automatically set at 2 seconds when you adjusted the focal length of the rendering camera. I clicked the tweener between 0:00 and the first keyframe and made it discrete (the little stair-step image on the timeline shows that) so the camera didn't zoom out a bit before making the zoom as it would with a bezier motion path, and I adjusted the ease in and ease out on the tweener between the focal length keyframes for a smoother start and stop.

Maybe you didn't set a starting keyframe? I can't think of another reason it wouldn't work. Hope this is helpful!

• Dex

I just tried it again on my XP machine, and it worked just fine. Good luck!