How To Zoom In With iMovie

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to zoom in on video in iMovie. Even if you think you know how to do this I want to show you a trick that will make it even better.

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So the key to zooming in in iMovie is to use the Ken Burns effect. Which isn't meant for zooming in but you can use it for that. However just using Ken Burns really doesn't get the effect that most people want when zooming. Here's some sample video in a project in iMovie. Now we're going to zoom in on this so it really helps that this is a 4K video. So we can zoom in and we're going to produce a 1080 video out so zooming in on a 4K video allows us to still have great resolution even when zoomed in. Right now this is a static shot. So it's just of this waterfall. What we would like to do is zoom in on a portion of it and you can do that using Ken Burns.

Now if you just use Ken Burns you click here on the Cropping tool. Go to Ken Burns and you get two boxes. The start box and the end box. So I can select End and I can make that box fit in a certain portion of the video here. So now I'm going to start with the Start box and go to the End box. When I hit the checkmark there you can see as I scrub over the video, I start all the way out and I zoom in to the portion that's just in that End box. This is a basic zoom. The problem with it is it's always zooming. You start at the beginning of the video, all the way zoomed out, and it gradually zooms in until it's zoomed in the maximum amount at the end. That's not always what you want.

Ideally you'd like to start showing the video, the entire thing, for a few seconds and then zoom in for a few seconds and then stay at the same zoom for the rest of it. To do that we're still going to use Ken burns but we're going to do something a little different. I'm going to Reset all here. So we'll Reset. I'm going to go to the first point where in the video, say right here, is where I want to start the zoom. I'm going to click so I put the line, the insertion line, there and I'm going to use Command B to split the clip. You can go to Modify, Split Clip as well. So now it's split into two pieces.

So this first piece is just going to stay the same. The second piece is going to start the zoom. Now you would think I would split it again where it's going to stay the same at a zoomed level. But I'm not going to do that yet. Instead I'm going to apply Ken Burns right here. I go into Cropping, Ken Burns, select the end box, zoom in like I want it, and then hit the checkmark. So now it stays the same for awhile and then it starts the zoom. It does the zoom for the entire length for the rest of the video. 

I want it to stop right here. I want it to be completely zoomed in at this point. I'm going to click there and Command B again to split the clip. When I do so now this clip, this middle one here, is going to do the complete Ken Burns zoom all the way to the middle. Then the third clip here is going to start the Ken Burns thing all over again. So I need to change this so it looks exactly like how it ends here at the end of the second part. I'm going to select it, go back to Cropping tools and the first thing I'm going to do is reverse the Ken Burns effect.

So make the Start box the End box and the End box the Start box. I do that. Now if I were to hit the checkmark here I'd get an interesting effect because it zooms in in the second part and then it immediately starts zooming back out. So it does the Ken Burns effect in reverse. That could be useful for some things.

But what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to switch from Ken Burns to Crop To Fill. It's going to use the Start box here that I have selected for that cropping. Now it just crops it to that and it does it without moving again. So now in the second part it zooms in, gets to that maximum zoom, and the third part matches that perfectly. So it stays at that zoom level. So if I play the whole thing I can see it does the zoom over this portion of the video and once it's complete it will just stay at that zoom level. Perfect. That's exactly what I wanted. To be able to zoom in during the video and then stay there.

So now the only think I need to be mindful of is I have three separate clips here. So if I want to move these around in editing I should hold the Shift key down and select all of them to move them all together as a unit.