iMovie Tutorial: How to Zoom In & Crop

– Two of the best ways to zoom in on iMovie is by using a jump cut and a true zoom.

And I'm gonna show youhow to do both of those in this video.

(camera focus noise) You gotta just press record.

Hey, my name is Nolan Molt with Think Media, and let's get right into this video.

So first we're gonna be talking about the jump cut zoom.

And so this is when you see an image playing and then it just suddenly pops forward and it zooms in with a jump cut.

So I'm gonna show you how to do that.

First of all, you're gonna need your video down here in the timeline.

I'm just gonna use this clip right here to do my jump cut as well as the true zoomthat I'll show you later.

But once you have this in your timeline, you're ready to start editing it so that you can zoom in.

The first thing that we want to do is figure out exactly where do we want to jump in and zoom in? So we're gonna watch this clip right here, it's about four seconds long, and maybe I want to jump and zoom in right when she looks up.

I'm gonna zoom in on her face.

So right here.

This is the play head, and I just want the play head to be sitting right there.

So now you can do this in two ways.

In order to cut it, you're gonna hit Cmd + B, and that has now splitthis into two clips.

I'm gonna hit Cmd + Z to undo that.

The other way to do it is to right click on the mouse and then hit split clip.

So now it's gonna zoom in right here, and let's say we want it to end maybe right here.

So it's a very quick zoom in, and then it cuts out.

I'm just gonna make another cut.

It's important that you do both those cuts if you want the zoom to end in the clip, before doing the zoom, because it's gonna makethings a lot easier and you'll see why right here.

So if we select the clip in the middle, this is the clip where we want to crop in, zoom in, and this will be our jump cut.

So we select it, and we're gonna hitthis little box up here.

And it says cropping, so we're gonna select that.

And then here there's acouple different styles.

There's fit, crop to fill, and Ken Burns.

And the one that we're gonna focus on for this video is crop to fill.

Now you notice that there's this white box around the video, and so in order to crop in using this box, you need to make the box smaller.

And then you can move it around.

So this is what they're going to see.

They're not going to see any of this dark spots out here, they're just gonna see what's inside this white box.

We're going to zoom inreally tight on her face for this zoom.

And then you're gonna wannahit this blue check mark to apply the crop adjustment.

So now if we hover over this clip, we can see that we're zoomed in here, and then beforehand thisis how it was normally, and this is the ending, how that was normally.

And that's why it's important.

Because if you were to make a cut, theoretically right here, this clip would still be cropped.

And so how you could fix that is you could just select this and hit reset.

And that would be another way to do it.

But that's just kind of adding in an extra step when youdon't need to do that.

So let's play this through and see what it looks like.

Awesome, so that's the first way to zoom in by using the jump cut.

And this is perfect for when you're doing YouTube videos, maybe you're talking to the camera, and if you mess up on some of your words, and you have to pause for a second, you can crop in, you can keep talking, and if you mess up on some of your words and you have to pause for a second, you can crop in, you can keep talking, and it kind of covers upsome of those mistakes.

So that's what a lot of YouTubers do, is they zoom in using this jump cut to cover up their mistakes.

Now we're gonna go over to this clip, I'm gonna show you what it looks like, and this is where we'regonna apply the true zoom.

All right, so that's the clip that we are working with.

And there's not reallya real name for this, but I've just called it the true zoom because it make sense to me.

But let's get right into it.

All right, so this one is a little bit more complex, but if you follow along with these steps, it's gonna be super simple.

So just follow along, and I'm gonna show youexactly how to do this.

So first things first, we wanna find out when we want to start the zoom, and then later we'll figure out where we want to end it.

But first things first, where do you want to start the zoom? I want the video to play a little bit, she maybe does a spin, and then about halfway through, maybe right here, I want the zoom to start.

So with my play head right here, and the clip selected, I'm going to right clickand hit split clip.

Now you wanna select the second clip, and you wanna go back to cropping.

This time we don't wanna hit crop to fill, we actually want to use Ken Burns.

You can see here that we have a start rectangle and wehave an end rectangle.

And the start rectangle, that's kind of hard to say.

Start rectangle.

Say that five times fast.

You want the start rectangle to cover the entire clip, which is how it does it just normally.

So you do not want to touch this start.

What you wanna do is you wanna change the end rectangle.

So if you double tap end, it's going to select this end rectangle.

Now, we can begin to crop in wherever we like.

So here, I want it to zoom in more so it can focus more on my wife and her spinning around.

So I want to end right there.

Now that I'm done I'm gonna hit the blue check mark.

Now we're gonna watch this through, we're not done yet, because there's one more crucial step we need to do.

But take a look on what it looks like now.

And this is gonna show you what Ken Burns do.

Boom, so that looks pretty cool because the camera is zooming in almost like it was a normal camera.

And from our start point all the way to our end point.

Here's the thing though, we want to change the end point to maybe end right about here.

Instead of going to thevery end of the clip, that's where I want theend of the clip to be, but I want the end of the zoom to be right here.

And this is where you need to make another cut on where you want the zoom to end.

So I'm gonna hit Cmd + B, and we're gonna watch it one more time and I'm gonna show you guys how to fix this issue that we're gonna see.

Okay, so if you see what it did there, kind of quick, we have our normal clip.

So on the second clip, it does a Ken Burn, and it ends where we wanted it to end, but this third clip does it again, because it was selected on Ken Burns.

So we want to select it, we're gonna go back into the crop mode, and here's what you need to do.

You want to switch the end and the start.

So this one right hereneeds to swap with start.

And how you do that is by clicking this symbol right here.

Now that the start hasreplaced the end piece, we are going to click crop to fill.

Now it's completely removed the Ken Burns, and so this third segment right here is going to end on the part where we wanted it zoomed in.

So I'm gonna hit the blue check mark, we're gonna watch thisagain one more time, and now you're gonna see the full effect of the true zoom.

Awesome, so that's exactlywhat we want it to do is do that quick little zoom, but it looks like a real camera zooming in rather than a jump cut.

I hope you learnedsomething in this video, and if you wanna seeour 10 tips and tricks for editing in iMovie, you can click on the screen right now to watch that video.

Or if you wanna watch a bunch of videos about editing in iMovie, you can click on the playliston the screen right now, as well as in the description we're gonna have linksto everything down below.

Don't forget to like andsubscribe to Think Media, and I'll see you guys in the next video.

(chill music).