How to Zoom to Selected Area of Video
Occasionally, you may want to add a zoom effect to your movies. You can use the zoom effect to create dramatic visuals and to show more close-up detail. An important factor to keep in mind is that your video resolution remains unchanged when you zoom in. For ex: a clip saved at high resolution (1920x1080) will look better when zoomed in than a clip saved at a low-res (640x480). That's because the higher a video clip's resolution, the more pixels it contains. The more pixels present, the more room you have to work as you zoom in — before the picture begins to appear grainy.
Applying the zoom effect in Bolide Movie Creator
- First, select the clip in the project that you want to zoom into: left-click its block. It can be a video or a photo. Without a selected clip the command is unavailable.
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Click the Operations on visual blocks button on the timeline toolbar and choose Zoom effect. A new Zoom effect block is added on a track right above your clip. It is as long as the clip, with a 0.5-second zoom-in at the beginning and a 0.5-second zoom-out at the end.
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Set the frame. Right after adding, the effect is in edit mode, and a frame appears in the preview window. Move and resize it so that it covers everything you want to enlarge to the full frame. If you do not see the frame, right-click the effect block and turn on Edit Mode.
- You can move the effect block along the track so that the zoom starts and ends where you need it, and shorten or lengthen it by dragging either end of the block.
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Notice the hatched areas in red dashed frames at the beginning and at the end of the effect block, labeled Zoom-In and Zoom-Out. They show how long the virtual camera takes to move in to the framed area and back out. Between them the zoom is static: the framed area is stretched to the whole frame.
- To change the zoom-in and zoom-out time, drag the inner border of a hatched zone. Or right-click the effect block and open Zoom-In/Out Time: Set Start/End Effect sets both times at once, Start Effect sets only the zoom-in, End Effect only the zoom-out. The choices are None, 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 s. The longer the zone, the slower and smoother the camera moves.
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As the play cursor moves through the Zoom-In zone, the picture zooms in closer and closer; in the Zoom-Out zone it slowly returns to the regular size.
- To remove the zoom effect, select its block and press Del, or right-click the block and choose Delete.
Good to know
If you need a static close-up without any camera movement, use Arbitrary crop and zoom (a button on the timeline toolbar, an item in the block's right-click menu, or Ctrl+W) — see Cropping Video Frame. To draw the viewer's attention to part of the frame without zooming, try Add Highlight Effect in the same Operations on visual blocks menu (see Highlight an Area of the Video).
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