sticking with what works

Monday Jun 4th 2007

One of my “trademark” editing techniques when doing screencasts is panning and zooming. This is a very simple 2-D editing technique that I figured out how to do a few months ago and have been doing it ever since. What it involves is ridiculously simple, that being to pan and/or zoom on a specific part of the video, hold that position, then zoom/pan back. I do it all the time. The reason I do it is because with screencasting it is sometimes required to focus on a particular window, piece of text or whatever it is you have to place focus on.

Even though the software I use works very well, I have heard time and time again that Adobe Premiere is the way to go. Tons of pros use it and swear by it.

So I downloaded it and tried it out.

I absolutely could not figure out how to do a video zoom-and-hold in Premiere. For those familiar with Premiere, I’m not talking about a video transition. Rather, I’m specifically referring to zooming on an existing “piece” in the sequence. I figured I could do this easily by setting an “in” and “out” point, do my zoom in/out and be done with it.

I scoped the internet for tutorials on how to do this ridiculously simple thing.

The result? Nothing.

So I scoped thru every single friggin’ menu in Premiere. Zoom-and-hold is simple. There has GOT to be a way to do this… I said to myself.

But alas, I couldn’t find a way.

I’ll keep Premiere installed to see if I can figure out how to do this.. but hmph.. why is this stupidly easy 2-D editing technique simply not there in Premiere?

If I do in fact find out how to do this, I’ll post a how-to here. Otherwise I’ll go back to the other software I’ve been using.

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