When blocking a scene, much focus is on where to move the camera. Do you put it here or there? What kind of lens do you want? Will there be any movement? Ultimately, every cinematographer wants to know: What kind of shot do you want?

But what about movement not of the camera but of the lens? What about including the strangest of choices and the seemingly only word you rarely dare mention when explaining what you want from a shot…a zoom?

As silly as it sounds and as basic as the action, zoom is rarely seen in movies and television shows. I’ve been in film courses and cinematography lessons where the teacher, after explaining almost all of the camera's features and what kind of shots we should take, has said that the zoom is seldom done or needed, which might be why we don’t see it that often today.

But why? What about the zoom makes it so controversial or unappealing to directors and cinematographers? This is my video explaining why.

Special thanks to hannachi dhafer and chemin davide for their videos capturing zoom shots in cinema, which are referenced here in this video.

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What is a Camera Zoom?

Digital zoom is a method of decreasing the precise angle of view of a digital photograph or video image. It is accomplished by cropping an image down to an area with the same aspect ratio as the original, and scaling the image up to the dimensions of the original. The camera's optics are not adjusted. It is accomplished electronically, so no optical resolution is gained. Digital zooming may be enhanced by computationally expensive algorithms which sometimes involves artificial intelligence.

In cameras that perform lossy compression, digital zoom is preferred to enlargement in post-processing, as the zooming may be applied before detail is lost to compression. In cameras that save in a lossless format, resizing in post-production yields results equal or superior to digital zoom.

Lower-end camera phones use only digital zoom and do not have optical zoom, while many higher-end phones have additional rear cameras, including fixed telephoto lenses that allow for the simulation of optical zoom. Full-sized cameras generally have an optical zoom lens, but some apply digital zoom automatically once the longest optical focal length possible has been reached. Professional cameras generally do not feature digital zoom.

An optical zoom camera can be zoomed to its optical limit, and further zooming is sometimes allowed by digital zoom. Digital zoom uses the centre area of the optical image to enlarge the image. By reducing the image size, digital zoom occurs without image deterioration of the output image, and some cameras have a "not-deteriorated image" mode or an image deterioration indicator.

Some camera firmwares store lossily digitally zoomed images with accordingly reduced dimensions (width and height) rather than upscaling it to the original raster resolution. The benefits are reduced file sizes and the ability to calculate the zoom level from the image's dimensions, if not included in its meta data.

Cameras may have an intelligent zoom feature that allows an additional magnification of 2.0× on top of its optical zoom. Many cameras have 2 options: 1.4× and 2.0×. The intelligent zoom only uses the centre of the image sensor and does not interpolate the original resolution, so the resulting image quality is good in reduced resolution.

Hybrid zoom is a concept used in smartphones that takes advantage of optical zoom, digital zoom, and software to get improved results when zooming in further than the lens' physical capabilities. Smartphones with optical zoom have lenses with 3× or 5× magnification. Trying to zoom in further than this limit may result in loss of quality as the camera switches to digital zoom, though hybrid zoom may mitigate this.

Photographers can purposefully employ digital zoom for the characteristic low-fidelity appearance of the images it produces. The appearance of poor quality in photographs can be intentionally used to imply carelessness on the part of the photographer and a sense of candidness in the photograph.

And if you’re still reading this – hello.

This video is made through Fair Use under copyright law for the purposes of education in criticism or review; as well as parody or satire. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92c https://www.copyright.org.au/ACC_Prod