Using Track Motion With/Vs. Zoom/Crop

I have 2 clips (Right and Left) that I want to crop in such a way that they are smaller and I can put one clip on the left side of the screen and one clip on the right.

I can use the Pan/Crop and choose "No" for "Stretch To Fill Frame" and pretty easily crop to the size that I want for each clip.

From there, I'm able to use Track Motion to position the clip where I want it on the screen.

Here's the problem... I want to use keyframe motion with the crop/pan to move from one area of the image to another. The problem is that when I do that it doesn't stay positioned when I first put it with Track Motion.

I guess what's happening is that using Track Motion moves the whole clip area and when I change the panning it stays on the same "stage area" and just moves across it... not what I want.

I want the pan to happen and everything stay in the same exact place on the screen. I'm sure there must be a way to do that and I'm just missing some little thing.

I hope that makes sense and I appreciate any help you can give.

Thanks.

This is going to be a two-step process. Instead of telling you which buttons to press, I'll give you an analogy to better understand the tools and what they're going to be used for:

Consider that the track motion is basically like moving a virtual TV screen around 'inside' of your preview pane- in 3D space. Now consider that pan/crop is just that: panning and cropping the image that is playing on those two virtual TV screens. So first position your two 'TV screens', then choose your pan/crop settings for the image playing on each individual TV screen.

Idiot Savant... ok, maybe just Idiot
http://seth.savant-studios.com

Perhaps I'm not grasping what you're trying to do but the way I'm reading it is that you want the screen split in half and want to be able to move around from one side to the other. If that's the case here's one way you could do it.

- Have two video tracks with one of the clips in each.
- Resize each of the clip as desired so one occupies one side and the other clip the other side.
- Render this in a lossless AVI file.
-start a new project and drop the AVI file on the timeline.
- Use track motion and keyframing to move across the screen as you please.