Real deep zoom vs the Ken Burns effect
Two very different techniques get called "a zoom video". One crops and pans a single photograph. The other lines up several real photographs, each taken closer than the last, and flies through them. Zoom Buzz does the second.
What the Ken Burns effect does
The Ken Burns effect takes one photo and moves a cropped window across it over time, enlarging as it goes. It is named after the documentary technique of panning and zooming across still photographs, and it is what most "photo to zoom video" apps actually do: PZPIC and Pan & Zoom: Ken Burns Effect build a whole app around it, Zoomy applies the same zoom-in/zoom-out motion to a single photo or clip for Instagram Stories, and CapCut's keyframe tool does it by hand, with a Scale keyframe at the start of a clip and a bigger one at the end.
All four start from one image. The "zoom" is a crop getting smaller and a scale getting bigger, played as a video.
What Zoom Buzz does instead
Zoom Buzz starts from several photos, taken from one spot at increasing real zoom levels, the way the how-to-create-a-zoom guide shows. A zoom needs at least three; five to eight works best. Zoom Buzz finds the same scene across every photo, lines them up, and renders the flight between them, so the video passes through a real, separately-photographed frame at every stage of the journey, not one photo stretched thinner and thinner.
Why the difference shows up on screen
A pan-and-zoom effect can only ever show you what was already in the original photo. Crop far enough into a single frame and you are looking at a small block of its existing pixels, scaled up: the detail stops arriving, however smoothly the crop moves. Zoom Buzz's closest frame is a real photograph taken at real optical zoom, of the same detail you saw in the first frame, so the picture stays sharp for as long as your camera could see it sharply.
Side by side
- Source material. Ken Burns: one photo. Zoom Buzz: three or more photos of the same subject, at different zoom levels.
- What "zoom" means. Ken Burns: a shrinking crop of one image. Zoom Buzz: a flight through several real photographs of the same detail.
- Detail at the end of the zoom. Ken Burns: bound by the original photo's resolution. Zoom Buzz: as sharp as your camera could shoot that detail on its own.
- What you need to shoot. Ken Burns: nothing new, any existing photo works. Zoom Buzz: a few seconds at the scene, stepping through your camera's zoom.
Where a pan-and-zoom effect is still the right tool
If you only have one photo of a moment that is over, a Ken Burns-style pan and zoom is still the only option; Zoom Buzz cannot invent the closer photos you never took. Zoom Buzz is for the moment you are standing in front of the subject, phone in hand, with time for a handful of photos.
See a real deep zoom
Each one is several real photographs, not one photo stretched.