Blackmagic Forum

Hi!
I do a lot of pan & zoom in my videos. And the way I do it feels very clunky. I haven't found better alternatives yet but this may be due to too many "tutorial" videos explaining you how to pan & zoom the usual way. This is why I'm asking the question. I'm open to external tools, like Autohotkey or even specialized hardware.

What do I use pan & zoom for?
Quite simply I want to highlight parts of the screen. I'm recording video games, and if there's a text or icon or animation that I want to focus on, I want to show it BIG on the screen real quick (jump cut, not a dynamic pan/zoom).

How do I pan & zoom?

Using Inspector:
- Shift position X (mouse drag) until whatever I want the focus on is about in the center
- Shift position Y likewise
- Zoom (mouse drag) until the content matches the screen nicely
- re-adjust position X/Y and zoom individually until I'm happy with it (this usually takes the longest because these settings influence each other, especially when zooming on near the edges of the video)

How would I like to pan & zoom?

Quite simply like I use to in 3D modelling software: use the mouse to pan around, use hotkeys or the mouse wheel to zoom. Being able to do both in parallel and getting it "just right" within a fraction of the time it takes me now (ie a few seconds compared to a minute or more!).

Preferably I would love to zoom in on what's currently centered on but hey, I can live with zooming also panning content away from the center if I can easily re-adjust it simply by moving the mouse.

Question
Is this in any way possible?

Any suggestions welcome! Thanks!

Try doing the PTRZ with the control overlays on the timeline viewer.

Thanks for the pointer, this changes EVERYTHING!

In case someone else stumbles across this and is similarly noobish than I am:
- PTRZ stands for pan, transform, rotate, zoom
- how it‘s done is explained in the first 4 minutes of this video (ugh i can‘t post URLs so: channel „Chris‘ Tutorials“ title: „Learn Viewer Overlay Editing Tools ...“)

The "Dynamic Zoom" option in the Inspector panel is another great way to do this. You turn on the effect in the Inspector panel and select the "Dynamic Zoom" view from the transform icon's drop-down list at the bottom left corner of the timeline viewer. This gives you two framing outlines - a green one for the start of the clip and a red one for the end - the clip will pan and/or zoom from start to end based on those outlines.

Thanks, I‘ve been using dynamic zoom. However I need jump cuts and to be honest: dynamic zoom doesn‘t give me any preview while editing and i find it very hard to match it exactly where it needs to be at the end when the ingame camera is moving too. I cannot (yet) control myself to keep still while playing.

sitterheim wrote:...dynamic zoom doesn‘t give me any preview while editing...

When you click the view onscreen controls icon at the lower left of the timeline viewer and select "Dynamic Zoom", the viewer fits the image to its windows so that you can adjust the onscreen controls as needed. If you want to see what the resulting zoom or pan looks like, click the icon a second time to turn off the onscreen controls.