How to add zoom effects to a screen recording

To add zoom effects to a screen recording, you either keyframe the scale and position of the video in an editor, one zoom at a time, or use a recorder that makes zooms from your clicks and typing and lets you adjust them afterward. My name is Vince, and I built Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, to do the second, mostly so that I could stop doing the first. When you stop recording, the editor opens with zooms already made, each one easing in on what you clicked, holding while you work there, and easing back out. What follows is why zooms help, what separates a good zoom from a jarring one, what doing it by hand actually involves, and how to shape the zooms Focal makes.

Why zoom a screen recording at all

A screen recording is usually made on a big monitor and watched on something much smaller. A 4K screen shrunk onto a phone turns menus into specks and body text into gray lines. Even on a laptop, a full screen recording of a settings page, playing in a browser tab, is hard to read. A zoom fixes that by filling the frame with the part that matters.

It does a second job that matters just as much: it tells the viewer where to look. A full desktop has a dozen things competing for attention, and only one of them is the point. When the frame moves in on the button you are about to press, the viewer knows what you clicked and why, and you never have to say “up in the top right corner, no, the other one”. Done well, zooms are how a recording points.

What a good zoom does

The zooms people notice for the wrong reasons are the ones that look cut rather than filmed. A filmed zoom behaves like a camera held by someone who is paying attention. A cut one behaves like a camera that just heard its name. A few principles get you most of the way, and each one comes with a matching mistake.

• Ease in, hold, ease out. The camera speeds up gently, slows as it arrives, stays put while you work, and leaves the same way. A zoom that jumps to full size in one frame reads as a cut, and a zoom at a constant speed looks mechanical.
• Pan between nearby targets. Click a field and then a button just below it, and the camera should stay in and slide across, not back out and come in again. Pumping in and out between two nearby clicks is the most common mistake I see, and it is tiring to watch.
• Do not zoom on every click. Some clicks are housekeeping, like focusing a window or closing a tooltip. Zoom on those and the important ones start to look less important.
• Let it rest during scrolling. Scrolling a zoomed page moves everything at once and loses the viewer. Stay out while the page moves, and zoom again when you stop and act.
• Wait for the action. A camera that drifts toward the next target before you click gives away what is coming and leaves the current target half framed. Move when the hand moves.
• Blur the motion a little. A real camera blurs what moves fast. A little motion blur during a zoom or a pan makes the movement read as one smooth motion instead of a series of sharp frames.
• Do not zoom too far. The viewer should still know which part of the screen they are looking at. Go in far enough to read, and stop before the context disappears.

Zooming by hand in a video editor

Any editor with keyframes can do this, and the recipe is always the same. You put the recording on the timeline and, for each zoom, set a keyframe for scale and position where the zoom starts, another where it reaches full size, another where the hold ends, and a last one where it is back out. Then you set the easing on each keyframe so the motion is not linear, and check that the position you chose keeps the target in frame at that scale. A pan is two more keyframes on position while the scale stays the same. Motion blur is a separate effect, if your editor has one.

That is four keyframes and some easing per zoom. A demo with thirty clicks worth showing comes to over a hundred keyframes, and if you trim a section later, every keyframe after it may need moving. There is a second problem: most recorders draw the cursor into the video, so when you scale the picture up, the cursor scales with it and goes soft. I wrote about that choice in why Focal records your screen without the cursor.

Doing it by hand gives you complete control, and for one short clip it is fine. As a habit for every demo, it is the step people quietly stop doing, usually somewhere around the third one, and the recordings go back to being hard to read.

How Focal makes zooms automatically

Focal records the screen without the cursor in it. The cursor’s position, clicks and shape are logged as data, a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video, and so are key timings. That record is what the zooms are made from, and it is why every one of them can be changed after recording.

When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already in place:

• Clicks and bursts of typing become zooms, with a camera that eases in and out like a spring.
• Zooms close together join into one that pans from one target to the next, instead of backing out between them.
• The camera waits for each click rather than drifting toward the next one.
• Clicks on Focal’s own control bar never cause a zoom. Your viewers came to see your app, not mine.

You choose what starts a zoom in the Zoom tab, under Make zooms for me: clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts or scrolling. To begin with, clicks, right clicks and typing are on and the other three are off, so scrolling never starts a zoom unless you ask it to, and the camera rests while a page moves. You can see the zooms in motion on the home page.

Shaping a zoom in Focal

Automatic zooms are a starting point, not a verdict. Every one can be changed, and you can add your own.

Adding and moving zooms

Drag on the zoom lane, or press Z, to add a zoom. Press K to add a keyframe inside a zoom. From there the zoom can move its focus or change its level, and you choose whether it eases, glides or jumps to the new framing. To choose what a zoom looks at, click that spot in the video. If the thing you want to show moves, such as a drag or a drawing, let the zoom follow the cursor instead of holding on one point. Zooms split, trim and nudge on the timeline the way clips do.

Level, hold and speed

Each zoom has its own level, which is how far in it goes, and its own hold time. Speed has three settings, Slow, Smooth and Snappy, for all zooms at once or for one. My habit is to pick one for the whole video, then change single zooms where a moment needs more time or less. The zoom feel is part of a style, so once you find a look you like, it can be saved by name and set as the default for new recordings.

Motion blur on zooms and pans

Motion blur is on by default for zooms, pans and fast cursor moves, and its amount is in the Zoom tab. Turn it down if you want frames that stay crisp when someone pauses the video, and someone always pauses the video. Turn it up if the motion still looks steppy.

When you change the settings

Changing the zoom settings updates the automatic zooms at once, so you can try a different speed or a different set of triggers and watch the whole video change. Zooms you edited or deleted stay as you left them. That means you can fix the three zooms that matter by hand and still change your mind about the rest. The preview is drawn by the same renderer as the export, so the zooms you watch in the editor are the zooms in the file.

Zooms in a vertical video

A 9:16 frame shows a narrow slice of a wide screen. Fit the whole desktop into a tall frame and it becomes a thin strip with empty space above and below, which is a lot of phone for not much app. Crop it instead and a zoom that framed a toolbar in 16:9 may miss half of it. In a vertical video the zoom has more to do: it has to aim at the action, not only enlarge it.

Focal’s aspect ratios are 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 21:9 and Source, and changing the aspect ratio re-aims the zooms and captions for the new frame. The same project gives you a wide video for YouTube and a tall one for Shorts or Reels, and you can check the tall one in the preview before you export. The whole process is in how to turn a screen recording into a vertical video.

If the recording is a product demo, how to record a product demo video on Windows covers the rest of the setup. Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, with no time limit, no card and no account, and exporting needs a license. Download the trial, record something with a few clicks in it, and see what the zooms do.