Adding zooms by hand

Auto zoom finds the busy moments for you, but sometimes you know the moment — a reveal you want to land on, a detail the planner skipped. Playback gives you a few ways to place a zoom yourself, and every one of them drops a real zoom you can adjust and reframe like any other.

Hover and click

Move the pointer over empty space on the zoom lane and Playback previews the zoom a click would create — a dashed pill with a + badge showing the exact span, about 3 seconds fitted around that spot. Click, and it’s real: the zoom drops with a little landing pulse and comes up selected, ready to fine-tune in the inspector.

Drag to draw

If you want a specific span rather than the default, drag across empty lane space instead. A ghost pill follows the drag, snapping to useful times — with a tick when it lands flush against a neighboring zoom for a seamless handoff. Release inside the lane to commit.

Changed your mind mid-drag? Press Esc, or slide the pointer up or down out of the lane and release — nothing is created. Zooms have a floor of about half a second, so a drawn span can’t be blink-and-miss-it short.

From the menus

• The timeline’s + menu (in the lane gutter on the left) always has Add zoom — it drops the standard 3-second zoom at the playhead. If the playhead is somewhere a zoom can’t fit, the item disables and tells you why.
• Right-click the timeline and choose Add zoom here to drop one at the spot you clicked.

Where it aims

A hand-placed zoom isn’t a blind push into the center. When your recording has cursor activity, Playback aims the new zoom the way Auto zoom would — framed on what you were doing during that span. Think of it as auto zoom, but you pick the moments. If there’s no cursor data to read, the zoom holds the center until you reframe it.

Tips

• Let Auto zoom go first. Run it, keep what works, then hand-place the one or two moments it missed. Re-running Auto zoom never touches your hand-placed zooms.
• Click for the moment, draw for the span. The hover-and-click drop is right for most highlights; reach for drag-to-draw when the zoom needs to cover a whole interaction.
• One ⌘Z undoes the whole drop. Placement, aim, and selection are a single step, so experimenting is cheap.