How to use zoom and maintain proper scale?

[theRealPedron]

I've been searching for a bit on this, including in this forum, and can't find an answer that works for me. I have a video that I am using the Zoom effect with. I move it around during the video. However, the aspect ratio on the video is wonky for most of the zooms. It's ok for a couple. For the bad ones it's all stretched and looks terrible. Is there a way to get this to look better, or am i going to have to calculate the aspect for each zoom? 😃

thanks!

[R Neil Haugen]

Motion/Scale shouldn't change aspect ratios at all. How are you zooming?

Neil

[theRealPedron]

Neil, i appreciate your reply. It made me realize i broke the first rule of foruming.... Thou shalt be clear and concise! 😃

What i meant to say in my original post is that I am using the Crop Effect, and the zoom tool in that. It works great! The only problem is that if the space i need to zoom is too small it doesn't work well.

My solution is that I just zoom in on it, then play around with the 4 different crop properties until it looks right. it's working for now.

The other solution was to use the actual zoom... but if I want to zoom different parts of the screen i'd have to move my video all around, right? there is probably a gap in my knowledge here (i'm a newbie still, so i have lots of those!), but this is working.

The video is a technical instruction, so I'm zooming in and out of different sections of the screen constantly. Do you have any suggestions for how to do this besides using the Crop effect, combined with the zoom switch? thanks!

[kevina41766135 · Accepted solution]

Yes, you want to be using the Motion/Scale effect! (Just to be sure, you know how to work with keyframes, right?)

Premiere Pro: Animate the Scale, Location & Rotation of Images Using Keyframes - YouTube

Not sure why you would have to crop anything at all. Just make keyframes for the "scale" and "position" of the video, and you can effectively "zoom" into the video by just making the video larger. Don't worry about the parts of the video that are gonna be outside of the frame.

[theRealPedron]

keyframes are awesome. i will try the motion/scale effect next! thanks.

[R Neil Haugen]

In the Effects Control Panel, at the top in Motion, you gave controls including keyframes to chang both scaling (zoom) and position. The first position axis moves left or right, the second is the up/down control.

Those might help you.

Neil

[Randune23]

I'm having similar issues.  In PP, I'm trying to zoom in on a picture using Effect Controls\Motion\Scale.  Without any other effects on this clip as soon as I go over 50% zoom the people in the picture become short and fat.  I don't know why this is doing this in my timeline.  It's only a collection of files.  Most of the files are 2448 x 3264 (1.0).  The sequence settings are set at 1440 x 1080.  In over 20 years of working with PP, I've never had the scale give me issues like this.  I also tried adding a crop effect and zooming in using Effect Controls\Motion\Scale and it gives me weird green bars where I cropped.

[theRealPedron]

Yeah. i was WAY off with using the ZOOM flag on the crop tool. The scale/position keyframe combo works WAY WAY better. live and learn! thanks everyone for the input. i REALLY appreciate it