How to achieve this zoom effect?

[Andy Neil]

You can clearly see the cut if you go frame by frame during the zoom. On a You Tube video, pause just before the zoom at 17 sec and use the period ( . ) key to step through frame by frame (btw, the comma ( , ) will go back frame by frame too).

The zoom begins on the outgoing clip while it’s still moving, but once the position of the girls arms are more or less the same as the incoming clip, he freezes the shot while continuing the zoom. Then as soon as the zoom finishes he hard cuts to the new shot. He made sure when zooming in that the relative position of the girl in the center was the same as the incoming shot to hide the cut. But if you go back and forth at the edit point, you’ll see clearly how she’s not exactly in the same position and the image is terribly blown up and pixelated. But it happens so fast at real time that your eye doesn’t catch it.

To do this, you only need the basic keyframing inside FCP. There’s a caveat though. If you want a bezier timed zoom, you need to use the ken burns effect or else build the appropriate Effect in Motion because FCP keyframing doesn’t let you smooth keyframes on the scale parameter. This also means that if you’re keyframing position as well as scale (which is likely) you’ll need to view the keyframes in the viewer, rt click and choose linear from the menu otherwise you’ll have default smoothing applied to only the position keyframes which looks jerky if you’re scaling the image up too.

To create the freeze you can just use the blade speed command on the outgoing shot and change the speed to 0% for the hold frames. You can apply the zoom blur to the incoming shot and keyframe that as well if you want to fake a camera blur.

Andy

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107277729326633563425/videos

[Mark Suszko]

What he said, just adding that you can get some funky looks by intentionally mis-using the new morph cut in FCPX between two dis-similar frames.