Smooth Zoom in Premiere Pro – Create Quick and Easy Transitions

Smooth Zoom in Premiere Pro

Today, I’m going to show you how to zoom in Premiere Pro. Also, you can see how you can create different zoom effects in your footage. So when zooming into our footage, it all comes down to using the scale parameter here in your effects controls so you can use the scale parameter to zoom in, zoom out your clip

. You can also use your position parameter your X value to move your clip left and right and your Y value to move your clip up and down. And you can reset any of these parameters by hitting this arrow here and reset it back to the default values.

How to make a Punch Cut Zoom with No Keyframes

And one of the easiest ways to zoom in on a clip is to use what they call a punch, cut or cut to close up. And for this type of zoom, you don’t need any keyframing. I have a clip here in the timeline.

I’m just going to move my play head over. I’m going to make two cuts here on this clip. Hit C for the razor tool make one cut right there. Bring my play head over. And it’s where I want my punch cut to end.

I’ll make another cut right here. Hit my V key to go back to my selection tool. And then I’m going to select that middle clip. I’m going to adjust my scale parameter and zoom in, and I’m going to change my X and Y values kind of center this.

And so as I play this back. Here is my zoom in or my punch cut. And now it’s going to go back to the wide view, and that’s the easiest way to Zoom if you don’t want to use any keyframing.

How to Zoom In and Out Using Keyframes – The Basics

So now with this clip here, we’re going to zoom. And we’re going to use keyframes. To enable keyframing, come up to your effects controls. And if you’re going to use position and scale together or one or the other, you would click on the stopwatch right here and right away.

It creates default keyframes. And if you move your play, head over. And let’s say I want to scale this up. And when I made a change to the scale at the position of my play head, it made another keyframe.

And if I play this back, you could see it zoomed. And the distance between the initial keyframes and the last one is the amount of time it takes for your clip to zoom in. And if you need to move your keyframes at the same time, just highlight them and they both turn blue and you can

move them back and forth to change your starting position or your ending position or your keyframing. Now, to help with a smoother zoom, you can highlight in this case the first keyframes and right click and come down here to temporal interpolation and say, Ease out and you notice that your keyframes change shape.

And I’m going to do this to my second keyframe and right-click and say Ease In. What we’re doing here is we’re actually creating a bit of acceleration into the motion rather than to just abruptly starting and stopping.

So this should make it a little bit smoother looking. Play that back next to position and scale. If you drop down this arrow, you see that your keyframes have a graphical representation and so you can grab these handles and these will give you more control over your zoom.

So if you want to zoom out, it’s basically the reverse. So if I have my clip selected here and I’m going to click on scale and position to make my default keyframes, and I’m going to change the value of my scale here to something like 150.

And you just move your play, head over to where you want to go back to your wide view. So at this point, I could either reset parameter, which is going to make it go back to 100 or I can put in the value 100 into my scale.

I’m going to say reset. It created another keyframe there and we can playback so it is a close-up or zoomed in. And now we’re going to zoom out. So that’s the basics of using keyframes to zoom in and zoom out of your clip.

How to Use the Transform Effect to Zoom

So now another option for zooming in an a way to boost the scaling option is to come over to your effects and search for something called transform. I’m going to get the transformer effect and drop it on my clip.

So it’s the same as before we’re still going to use the scale and if we need you to position to zoom in. But this time we’re going to use the scale underneath the transform effect. So when you click on my stopwatch toggle animation for scale under Transform, I have my initial keyframe.

I’m going to bring my play head over and change the value of my scale to something like that. Just play this back. But now what we’re also going to do is come down here. We’re going to uncheck use composition, shutter angle and then we’re going to manually put in 180 and now we’re going to have it’s a

little bit more realistic motion blur as if the camera is actually zooming in. It’s a little bit of motion blur there, so that’s another little option to help you to zoom in.

How to Make s Digital Camera Zoom Effect

Now we can look at something called a digital zoom or a zoom that will call attention to a certain area on your screen. So a digital camera zoom effect is essentially when you’re zooming into an area and your screen from point A to point B.

So for this, we’re going to keyframe the position and scale. But first, we’re going to set the anchor point. It’s going to be easier to do this type of a zoom with the anchor point set first. In the program window up here you see this blue circle.

That’s basically the center of the image in the video. And if you hover over it, you see this square box. So with your anchor point selected in the effects control, you can move this over to a point that you want to draw attention to in your video clip.

So when you move this, it doesn’t move the image in any way. The positions all stay the same for right now, and you can use this to on a subject. You can move that anchor point anywhere like somebody’s nose or right on their eye.

You can zoom in that way. And now we need to go under motion in the effects controls and click on the position, stopwatch and a scale stopwatch. And we’re going to move my play head out. And this time I’m going to change my position, bringing up my scale, position it here and there is my end of my keyframe

. I’m going to play this back real quick, so I’m drawing attention to a spot on the video where I’m pointing out a control during a tutorial here, and you can highlight the last keyframes here and do an ease in.

And this is the final, really smooth digital zoom.

How to Create Motion Blur in a Transition

So in this example, we’re going to have a zoom and it’s going to zoom in in the middle of two clips and it’s going to have some motion blur. First we’re going to come down here to the bottom of the project panel and click on this icon where it says

new item and add adjustment layer. And so making sure that it is the same as my sequence, and drag that adjustment layer over my clips. That’s the way it looks. And put my play head right in between the two clips.

And I’m going to select that adjustment layer and go into my effects and search for transform effect. And I’m going to drop that on my adjustment layer. So now I’m going to make a couple of adjustments and come down here to my transform effect in scroll down and uncheck the use composition shutter angle, you know, change the shutter angle

to 360. This is going to create our motion blur in the transition. Now without moving the play head, I’ll come over to the scale, and I’m going to, change the value to 300. When you use my left arrow keys and move my play, head back three frames and change my scale,

to 100. And so that created another keyframe there, and I’m going to hit this arrow here that says, go to next to keyframe. That’s the first keyframe, and then I’m going to use my right arrow key and move over one frame.

I’m going to click add/remove keyframe. I have a new keyframe there, and I’m going to use my right arrow key to go over five frames. And then here’s where I’m going to change the scale back to 100.

And if you want, you can change the position of these keyframes to change your timing. But here’s the motion blur in our transition.

See the previous blog article here ➡️ Nest and Unnest Sequences in Premiere Pro – 5 Easy Ways to Use Them

See my photography website here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com