How do I magnify selected, moveable area

[Mwarren]

Working on a personal project. Building a video tutorial. Decided to use more After Effects than I planned because it's just so much fun. Anyway...

I want to call out certain regions of the screen with an effective magnifying glass. Sorta like this:

Here are the layers in the comp:

1. Zoom Frame : This is the actual comp containing the purple border and the crude, inner glass effect.
2. Magnifier : This is the shape layer I created back when I thought I needed one to.. hold the effect?
3. Adjustment Layer 1 : This is where I've applied the Detail Preserving Upscale effect.
4. Footage 1 : The actual footage.
5. Footage 2 : Same. I had thought I would mask one of these, connected (via null?) to the shape or whatever.

I feel like I'm close to figuring this out, but rather than fuss some more I turn to you.

Thanks for your attention.

[Rick Gerard]

Multiple layers and masking

Duplicate the footage, add a mask where you want to add the Magnify effect, add Magnify to the duplicate layer and adjust the center point and value to blow up the area, press Alt/Option + m to add a mask keyframe then Ctrl/Cmnd + X to cut it, deselect the magnified layer, grab the pen tool and click anywhere to start a new shape layer, then Ctrl/Cmnd + v to paste the copied mask path to the shape layer and set up a stroke only to give you an outline.

If you can't figure out how to use the Magnify effect type Magnify effect in the Search Help panel. You'll find it in the top right corner of AE. Check out the help files. They have an example that is almost exactly what you are trying to do.

[Mwarren]

Thanks for the lighting-like response speed. Did not expect for a Sunday. Additional detail I failed to include in initial post:

I know how to magnify just fine, my problem is that I can't create move my mask very easily when it's time to animate ​and​ include my little border thingie. Also: I'm using Detail Preserving Upscale because standard magnify is too lossy for my liking.

I actually developed a workflow that accomplishes exactly what I need (I dupe footage, comp it, then apply a 250% DPU zoom or whatever and animate path and extrusion), but it's labor intensive. I'm really striving here for something that is more portable than that.

I hope that makes sense. Thanks!

[Mwarren]

I figured it out! I just needed to get my parenting in a row and throw a mask on the actual adjustment layer. Blammo:

[Mwarren]

Okay, I spoke too soon. I'm mostly there. Now I have a new problem. Whenever I pan to the top of a scene, I get this problem:

I need to somehow anchor this thing but I don't know how yet. Can I control where it's sampling from?

[Kevin-Monahan]

Mwarren,

How did you end up accomplishing this effect? Let us know.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Mwarren]

Sure. Happy to share. I'm at work, so I'll just have to remember. Which shouldn't be too hard because I've executed it like 30 times at this point.

1. So, I have my footage in premiere that I want to do a zoom in on. So I send that over to After Effects.
2. Inside my After Effects project, I rename and what-not.
3. Inside the comp, I pre-comp the footage. Then I enter the precomp.
4. First thing in here, is I duplicate the layer. For the bottom layer, I set the opacity to 50%then lock it. This is my reference so I can tell what the heck I'm doing.
5. Because back in the top layer, I create a circular mask (usually right offscreen, nearby where my effect is going to be). I've been using a base transition rate of 10 frames. So I set keyframes at 1 and 10 for Path and Mask Expansion.
6. I do some fiddly ALT-click-grabbing to get the mask at frame 10 to be in just the right space (Expansion is great because you can alter the shape of the mask without messing up the roundness by grabbing points (wish there was a better way to resize masks, btw)
7. So then I have my expanding, round mask focused on my area of interest. Oh, and I'll set Easy Ease In for both Frame 10 values. Just for smoothness.
8. Then I hide my reference layer after I've copied it. Because I'm going to paste it into the main composition (which has my precomp).
9. So the main composition ends up with: Top Layer - Precomp containing only the round mask area anim / Bottom Layer - Reference Footage. Which I'm going to need, because...
10. I add Detail Preserving Upscale (with Detail Preserving selected) to the pre-comp and set it to 250%. Immediately, my effect drives the footage offscreen. So I do the Y/V dance, moving my anchor, dragging the footage, till I find it. Then I affix the anchor to the best location for the particular animation.
11. With that in place, I hide the bottom reference layer (back in Premiere, I have my background layer already in the timeline). And because of that, I can add a Glow effect to the linked-AE-footage. Then I crank the edges down to almost nothing (so it's got a sharp edge) and pick the width (in reality I just copy/paste the effect).

This is manual. And too labor intensive for me to want to futz with it any more than I already have. But it gets the job done. I will be sure to post a link to the final video once that's completed. Hope this is helpful. I'm happy to clarify anything that's still fuzzy. I'm writing this at work and don't have AE installed here so I'm just going from memory.

[istockplus]

Make you live easier, and apply magnify effect  to your footage (you can search for it in effects & Presets window) than link their center point to the shape you create, and sure you can play with setting to get the result you want

Also related your last issue, simple create a mask to the adjustment layer with same size of your picture (the area where you want the magnify to work only), so when you go outside the picture the magnify will disappear