I’m trying to use Blender’s VSE to zoom in to a particular region of my video for a short time. Say I’m interested in the top-right corner. I want to smoothly zoom into it, keeping the whole frame filled while I zoom-in, then some time later reverse the process and zoom back out.
The way I’m doing it right now is to add a transform strip to the entire video clip where I need the zoom in/out to happen. I mute the original strip, then set a heap of keyframes on the scale and XY position values at various points. One keyframe on each of the 3 values at the start, then another a bit later where I’ve scaled the video up and panned the frame across using the XY values, then twice more to reverse the process to make the zoom out happen.
I have to do this zoom in/out several times at different points in videos, and it feels like this is a really slow way to do it…
Is there a smarter way to do this in Blender? I started looking at Keying Sets, but that made my head start spinning. Anyway is it keyframes or keying sets or something else I should be using here?
I want to show an image briefly between two movie clips - like flashing up a summary slide between the end of one clip and the start of another. I want the image (summary slide) to gradually fade in as the first clip ends, then some time later fade out as the next clips begins.
I can make it work in a clunky kind of way using opacity and keyframes - similar to what I mentioned about zoom in/out in another thread. So I insert my summary slide image as a strip above and between the two clips, slightly overlapping. I set the image’s opacity to 0 then 1 and use key frames at these points, then do the opposite towards the end of the image strip to fade it out and bring up the next clip…
I have to do this about 6 times throughout my tutorial video. (The same process each time, just with a slightly different summary slide image and joining clips)
In the hopes that someone will go one better, I submit this as a partial solution to my original (zoom in/out) problem:
Don’t do the initial scale and grab operations by typing directly into the strip’s Property values. Download, install and enable the VSE_Transform_Tools add on. Use the G and S keys in the VSE Preview window to do these transformations visually.
By the way, does anyone know why my posts regarding zoom in/out and the other about fading an image between two clips got merged? I feel they are describing two distinct problems. The first is about a zoom (scale) transformation. The other is about using an image overly between 2 clips for a specific kind of fade effect by varying the opacity… Apart from the potential use of key frames, these seem like quite different problems to me. Hence 2 posts…
Anyway, I’d be happy for any pointers on the best way to go about achieving either of this effects in the VSE.