Zoom during recording

[Youpiiiii]

Hello,

How is it possible to "zoom" during the recording on certain parts of the recorded area?

Example: https://blackmagic.so/assets/demo.mp4

Thanks in advance for your ideas.

 

[koala]

Not easily. There is no explicit support for live zooming.
You can prepare a source to contain exactly what you intend to zoom later. Then for zooming you can drag the source borders to increase the size of that source, and you can drag the borders to the outside even beyond the preview screen, the but this "zoom" is not centered correctly as a real zoom. If you put that source behind another source that acts as a mask, the zoomed source doesn't appear to get bigger while you enlarge it, but the issue with centering remains.

The second issue is that if you try to search Google how others might have implemented a zoom feature, you will find only stuff how to bring the Zoom conference app into OBS.

The closest I was able to find as plugins to support some kind of zoom (however, whole scenes) is motion-effect and move transition:

motion-effect

The plugin is designed for source item animation. Features motion transition : Animate all sources between scene switch (easy to use) motion filter : Animate one source in the scene. Screenshot How to Install? Unzip motion-effect.zip and Put...

obsproject.com

Move

If you're using OBS version 27, you need to download version 2.6.1 or lower. Download Plugin for OBS Studio to move sources to a new position during scene transition If the 2 scenes contain a source with similar name (configured with settings)...

obsproject.com

Since you can use a scene as source, it might be possible to use these scene-wide zooms as smaller sources within another scenes.

 

[Youpiiiii]

Thanks @koala for your answer, I'll have a look at these links.
Just to be sure, does OBS Studio nowadays contain some post-processing tools that would allow to zoom on certain parts of a recorded video? (A little bit of editing with a timeline). Or not at all?

 

[koala]

No, OBS doesn't have postprocessing or video editing tools.
Actually, it has exactly one postprocessing function: you can remux recordings to a different container format, but this is no editing function.

 

[Youpiiiii]

Thanks @koala!
Maybe do you know a good Windows freeware allowing to do "magnification" on certain parts of the display with keyboard shortcuts + mouse?

Something like the Windows built-in "Magnifier" tool but better, with more options, more customizable?

 

[koala]

Video postprocessing tools don't have interactive zoom controls. These tools act like big batch processing tools. Basically they let you create a list of actions to apply to the video (this is called the project, you can see it as kind of recipe what to do with the sources), then the postprocessing tool will render a new video with all actions applied. So, to create a zoom, you will probably choose a source area, drag it on the timeline to one or two seconds in the future and enlarge it. If rendered, the size of the source area is enlarged linearly within that time, so it appears as if is zoomed. It's long ago I needed advanced features like this, but I assume any reasonably sophisticated NLE (non linear editor) will support such functionality.