Framing your video using scale & position in Premiere Pro

Hi everyone, in this video we're going to crop this video, and zoom in a little bit, and reframe it, because it's going to go from this to something more like this. Exact same shot, just cropped in, gets rid of the microphone that I left in the video by accident. I'm going to show you some of the hard and easy ways to use Position and Scale to achieve this, let's get going. 

First thing we're going to do is we need to acknowledge the fact that I have my microphone in the shot by accident. Like I pretend it was for this class, but you can kind of see, that's the tippy-top of my shotgun microphone. You can see it moves when I move. I basically have changed position alternately through this course, because I am cheap and I want to change my camera angle without having to change my actual camera angle. So I'm kind of making it feel like I'm kind of using two different cameras by moving around. 

What I'm going to do is zoom in on this kind of alternate ones. So there, where I'm kind of like on the left hand side, then in the middle, I want to zoom in, and all of them, I need to get rid of the microphone. So let's do all of that. We'll start with cropping the microphone. Let's do this first one, you can kind of see it there. It's kind of on purpose, I make sure that I leave some room. When you're filming you get kind of-- whether it's photography or videography, you get-- you can chase the perfect composition where you have it framed nicely, but gives you no wiggle room afterwards. 

So my wiggle room is going to allow me to chop off this microphone, and move it around just a little bit. So to do it we click on the clip, and we're going to go to the 'Effect Controls'. If you can't find Effect Controls, go to 'Window', 'Effect Controls'. So clip selected, and what you're looking for is - I'm going to twiddle these up - I'm looking for the Motion. Motion has Position and Scale, those are the main ones. So what I'm probably going to need to do is just scale it up. Now when you're dealing with Scale and Position you can use your arrow, double click it down here and start playing around with it. I don't know why, they remain real high, then it's just easier dragging these things, I'll show you both. 

Fit is probably not going to work because I can't see the edges, because I want to scale it up a bit, so let's go down to 50%, and I can scale that up, and it's perfect. That is all fine when there's just one of them, when there's two of them, I try and double click stuff, ends up picking the wrong thing, the wrong clip. It's not right now, because you're watching, but it does happen, I just want to let you know that if you're finding it, frustrating a little, and you're from another bit of Adobe land, like Illustrator, InDesign, or Photoshop, you're like, "Why not just do it over here? You'll find out, because this is a little bit clumsy. 

So I have got in a habit of just doing it over here. What I mean by that is, can you see the scale, click, hold, hold, hold, drag it to the right, drag to the left. I find that it's just easy, especially when you've got more than one layer, you can see, I've scaled mine up a little bit, you can see, it's kind of cropped it off, and what I might do is lift it up a teeny tiny bit. You can, with your Selection Tool, make sure it's selected the clip. You can click on it, double click it, then just drag it up. Again, there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just going to use this, because it always ends up being easier. 

So just clicking and dragging slightly, so it moves up. So it's going to reframe this one, and even though I've done it really subtly, actually want it to be a bit more because I left room around the outside, for a bit of this. So I'm going to do that, drag it up. Just get down the bottom there, I feel like that's a bit of composition. Now scale it up by 107, and that's really bad. Well, not really bad, it's moderately bad. Scaling anything up means that it's potentially going to pixelate, or, you know, we're increasing the size of it, and eventually if you do it - let's go all the way. - you start to see all this kind of like goop, so if I play this now, it's going to be fine, but it's all blurry and yuck. Blurry and yuck, where's my face? Let's look for some proper blurry and yuck. That's the--

I can't even tell where I am at. Oh geez, I'll get the editor to speed this up. Okay, I won't. If you do get lost like this, I'm like, I should actually tell them, there's a reset button there, click that, whoo. Get it back to kind of back to the top left, and same with the Scale, let's get it back. Now I'll scale up a little bit more meaningfully. So I want to get it here because I want to show you that eventually, you're going to see, it's going to look pretty bad. 

So what limits do you put on your scale? I find, between, like a hundred and-- I find that as long as it's not too high, like 150, it's too high, over scaling, and it depends on your output. If you're going out to the cinema then you can't scale at all. You might get away with teeny tiny bits, but if you're going out to YouTube videos like me, I'm okay with scaling a little bit more heavily. So I'm going to go up, like if-- I'd be-- no, once you get out to about 150, you've probably gone too far, and even then that's like, that's pretty generous with it. I'm finding 110, nobody will notice. 

So I'm going to scale it maybe 115, you can click on them and type them, then I'm going to drag this one to the right, and eventually you'll get used to which ones these are. If you, for the next two years go, "Oh, undo,” I mean this one, you'll be like me for the first two years of using Premiere Pro. Can't even remember which one is which. Only now through sheer frustration, habit, I'm not sure, I know which one to drag. So that's my composition, I got rid of the microphone, and I have kind of centered it how I wanted. Maybe want a little bit more this way. Should I get rule thirds going here? Kind of got my-- I'm going for actually halves, I'm like--

So that's that one done. Let's look at this other one where I do my fake, different camera. You can set up two cameras to get two different angles, that will work even better. I'm not lazy, I'm just-- I don't think it's worth the effort setting up two cameras and trying to edit at the moment. I just moved my little stool around. Here I am, move my stool. And if I do a bit of this, did you notice in the intro that I just move stool? You probably didn't, of this particular course, because I'm going to show you why. I'm going to leave this error in here because you'll do it, you'd be like, "Did you just scale out to 200%, and it didn't change?" You can see why. You can see I still have that clip selected. Premiere Pro can be a little bit stubborn, it still thinks you're working on this--

I'm going to undo that, undo it again. Go back to make sure I haven't wrecked it. Now click on this clip. Now I'm going to bump it up quite a bit and break my rules on, like how much you can blow it up, I feel like that is good. It's hard seeing yourself caught in all these faces. So there, and there's cut to another-- does it look like another video angle? I hope it does, that's my trick anyway. So I've scaled it up a bit probably too much for lots of purists. So know that you might get in trouble for scaling that up that much, but not for me. 110%, nobody's going to notice, 132, you might do. You're going to notice a lot more in this particular footage, because I've scaled it down when I exported it, I put it as like low quality, mainly so that when you're downloading these course files, they weren't ginormous, because I think like this video here by itself is like 200 megabytes, and I've cut it down to like 8. 

So there's quite a bit of compression going on; still looks fine. All right, that's it, we've reframed it, we've played around with Scale and Position, and we've got rid of that mic that was in the top. Let's jump into the next video.