September 28, 2021
Dear friends, welcome! It happens quite often that the most important piece of information in a video lays in the details. So it’s not sufficiently visible looking at the footage in its original form. In these cases, being able to magnify the details, or to focus the viewer’s attention on them is extremely important. In this post, we’ll see how easy it is to magnify or spotlight details of a video with Amped Replay. Keep reading!
In Amped Replay, go to the Annotate tab, then click on the Spotlight or Magnify icon and drag over the detail you want to highlight or zoom. You can then configure the appearance tweaking the option on the right panel.
There are quite a lot of things to show today, so let’s jump into them with an example. We have a video of a possible drug dealing captured in a parking lot.
We would like to create an image where the face of the seller is magnified. Therefore, we scroll the video to the frame of interest and activate the Annotate panel. We click on the Magnify tool and drag a region where we want the zoomed pixels to appear.
Now that we’ve decided where the zoom should appear, we just need to click on the cyan dot and drag it over the object we want to enlarge:
Now we can customize quite a lot the appearance. In the right panel, we can adjust the zoom level by dragging the slider, and we can choose between two zoom methods. Exact Pixels (Nearest) will simply enlarge available pixels, while Better Quality (Bicubic) will create an interpolated zoom. You will typically need the first when your goal is to just show the available information, without adding any processing, while the second is preferred when your goal is to get a visually better version of available pixels. Below you can see the difference between the two modes, I’m using a large zoom factor to make it more visible.
The Border Type option lets you connect the zoomed region to the source pixels, which comes extremely useful when you’re applying several instances of Magnify in the same frame, as shown below:
The Spotlight tool works similarly. After activating the tool on the Annotate panel, you can drag a region over the frame. Then, you can adjust the Contrast and Brightness effects to be applied to the spotlighted region.
In all of the above, we only dealt with annotating stills. Next week, we’ll show several ways by which you can track all of these annotations so that they follow the object of interest. Don’t miss it!
That’s all for today! We hope you’ve found this issue of the “Amped Replay Tutorials: How do I do this?” series interesting and useful! Stay tuned and don’t miss the next ones. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, X, and Facebook: we’ll post a link to every new tutorial so you won’t miss any!