Hi
Regarding the Zoom obtained with the Crop effect. This is a reply I gave to an earlier post regarding this..
............ e.g. to zoom into a frame.
Select the clip, Click the Add effects tab and select Crop from the displayed items.
This will open the Effects window.
Click one of the green crosses to create a start position or keyframe. (Shown by the orange squares that come up on the blue lines.)
Click the Zoom to cropped region box to ensure the cropped area always fills the frame, and then click the Force Aspect ratio and select the value for your clip. (Normally 16:9)
Now slide either of the red cursor lines along to the right to the position in the clip where you want the zoom to finish. and adust the final image frame size and position by pulling in the yellow boxes on the preview image. (Note you will be zooming in to a smaller area in the frame)
The whole rectangle can be dragged to a final position.
Review the zoom by playing the clip in the preview pane and adjust if necessary
Click Apply and wait for VP to generate the frames. Your video clip will now zoom in with the parameters you set.
You can produce any number of effects (Zoom in/Zoom out/Pan left,right or diagonally with or without zoom etc.) by varying the start and stop frames position and size. The cropped area can also be made to move about and rotate with the Position and Rotate effects.
Note that the preview may look a little juddery as the resolution is much less than your actual video but the effect will be OK once the video has been rendered. ...............
The four blue lines to the right of the value boxes reflect the position of the four sides of the image one for each side. The left end is the first frame of the clip and the right end is the last frame of the clip. The zoom effect described alters all four sides simultaneously to retain the desired aspect ratio, but there is nothing to stop you setting the values differently so as to obtain any number of distortion effects...squashing or squeezing the image if the Fill to cropped area is clicked or just plain cropping if not, at the same time you can fix any of the values (create keyframes) on any of the lines at any point between the start and finish frames by clicking the appropriate green cross...just experiment.
Nat