Chapter 3: Special Effects – Zoom & Pan

All right! Your video is recorded and the audio sounds great. How can we spruce your masterpiece up a little more? Let’s add zooming and panning to bring focus to some of the areas of your video. Zooming sounds like it’s name – it is getting up close to the section of the video you want your watcher to pay attention to. Panning is when you change where the video is looking at. These features are really useful for when you have a lot of things on the screen and you want your watcher to pay attention to a specific part as you do something or explain something.

Some key points to remember:

• To activate Zooming, move to the point in your video you want to Zoom. Then click on the Animations in the menu, choose the animations tab and then finally, drag the scale up button to the needed position on your timeline. You can change the length of the Zoom and the placement by clicking on the Zoom arrow in the timeline.
• If you click on the timeline after the Zoom arrow, then move up to the scale slider in the properties panel (top right corner). Click on the canvas and move the shot to show the area of the display you want to zoom into. You can also adjust other settings for the animation here too.
• To add a Pan animation, move your playhead to where you want the pan to occur. Click on the Zoom-in-Pan button in the animation menu item and drag it down to the desired location on your timeline. Reposition your display in the canvas to where you want to end up after the pan.
• When you want to return to your “unzoomed” display, move your playhead to the location where you want the normal size to be. Click on the animations menu, animations tab and drag the scale up button down to the desired location. Move to the properties panel and reset the position (X, Y, Z) and the scale back to their originals by clicking on the swirly circles to the right of each line. 
• The playhead’s position is really important when you use these animation effects. If the playhead is before the animation, then it will activate the animation as it plays through the video. If the playhead is positioned after the animation and you make changes, they will take effect after where ever the playhead is located.

Feel free to play around with your video editing software to play with all the animation effects you have. You can always undo your practice with the undo button (or Ctrl + Z on your keyboard).

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