Bad edge softening with Resize node (Bug or at minimum undesireable)

[ManChicken]

I've been using a few Resize nodes in BFX doing a bunch of splitscreen/tiling, since there seems to be no other simple Crop effect.  Anyway it's been handy as I can dial in exact pixel sizes for my windows, use the Position X/Y to frame the image within the window (using Center Crop mode), and then position it onscreen downstream with a 2D Transform or whatever.

Sometimes I want to animate the Resize, to shrink it from a split-screen down into a quarter-screen window for instance.  But when I go to animate the Resize, I get this extreme softening of the edge, destroying my rigid lines.

See attached pictures which include the values of both an un-animated Resize and an animated one, which you can see are the same for the frame (in fact the animated one was duplicated from the unanmiated one.)  I can provide the batch setup if neeed but it's pretty easy to duplicate.

[Grant.Kay]

Hi Bob,

You might be better off in Action for the animations as it uses sub-pixel filtering.

Even though resize is great for quick racking shots etc, I have never been satisfied with it as animation tool as such.

Action should have the cropping you need. Either in the media list or you could the vertex/UV points of a surface to crop the image.

Hope this helps.

Regards
Grant

[ManChicken]

Thanks.  Yeah, animating Resize is weird (besides the edge softness anomoly) because the Scale and Width/Height values are related and it seems like you have to keyframe both of them for it to work.  Action crop is kind of awkward to deal with too though, with the media list way not being keyframable (?) and the UV way making it hard to be precise, easily keep things perfectly straight or be able to numerically create crops of specific sizes.

But, in the end, it compelled me to write this Matchbox shader.

[Anonymous]

Not sure I am hearing you, but you can animate crop. Autokey, F1-front view. Adjust Crop and go to next frame adjust Crop. Done. See animation pic attached. 

[ManChicken]

I guess my machine was having a bad day.  I did turn on Autokey and made some changes - it was even dropping keys in the timebar - but then when I'd scrub, none of the values actually changed.  It seems to be working now however.

But it still kind of sucks since the values in the media list are their own odd UI convention and don't give you the benefit of showing keyframes like normal numeric values, easily selecting them in the Animation editor, etc.  Plus they're not directly accessable from the timeline if you're trying to use it that way, making you bounce in and out of the full UI if you're just trying to do a couple of simple split screens on the timeline.  And it seems like the keyframes disappear in the timebar after you select other things in Action, only coming back if you pull up your BFX and reselect the Action node...

It has its place if you're already in Action doing other things, but having a quick, simple, straight edge crop is something I'm always amazed isn't built in to 2D Transform.