How to get a close-up of one person out of a two-person wide shot
Tell Vizard Agent which person you want alone and during which shots. It finds every window where that person is speaking on the wide camera, crops each one to a natural close-up without stretching, then rejoins the master frame by frame and checks the runtime and the audio track came out identical to the approved cut.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Two sentences do the work: the framing, and the freeze on everything else. The second matters more than it looks, because a request to change one shot is easily read as permission to improve the neighbouring ones as well. Describe the framing in body terms, not percentages.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
A wide shot of two people contains a close-up of each, at a lower resolution, if you crop it only while that person is talking. Most of what Vizard Agent does is not cropping but making sure the master matches the approved cut everywhere else. In the session behind this article it:
- Identified the interviewer's speaking windows in the wide source of a two-camera documentary interview and mapped each onto the wide-camera parts of the approved edit.
- Built a crop for those windows only and first rendered a test at the timestamp the user named.
- Read the actual error when a render failed, simplified the processing graph, and processed the timeline in windows, splitting any that failed.
- Measured frame counts at every window boundary and trimmed each window to frame-accurate boundaries to prevent drift between the rebuilt pieces.
- Aligned the joined master to the approved duration without re-encoding the audio, verified the duration, the geometry and the untouched audio stream, and checked the named timestamp and every later section.
When does this not work well?
Cropping trades resolution for framing, so the wide shot has to have pixels to spare. The person also has to be reasonably placed, because a crop cannot move somebody towards the centre without cutting something else off. Constant movement defeats a fixed crop, and if both people share one gesture, cropping cuts the exchange in half.
Common questions
Will it look soft? Softer than a real close-up. Vizard Agent crops from the highest resolution available.
How do I know the audio is unchanged? Vizard Agent copies the stream and verifies it afterwards.
Why not just zoom the finished video? Because zooming the finished file scales an already-compressed picture, while Vizard Agent crops the original and keeps every pixel the camera recorded.