Just be sure to customize where it zooms in.

You'll note that this allows you to really keyframe everything, and so by keyframing position and scale, as well as the ability to right-click on those keyframes and add ease, you can really get a truly refined smash-zoom. In this case, I applied a heavier blur and was able to take advantage of additional controls. For another variation on this, you could explore the prebuilt one up top here, and you'll notice the same thing was done with the layered transition stack.

Now you'll notice in the middle of the effect it smashes and it has a blur to hide the pixelation as it punches in. So it gets more blurry in the middle of the transition. I've got it applied, and I'll go forward, and right about here, before it does the smash switch, I'm going to crank that up. What we're going to do is turn on the blur value. If we take a look at this here, pay close attention to where the effects are applied. And let's just grab a Gaussian blur and apply that to both clips. Let's disable this top track here, and on the effect what I'll do is apply a blur. What I'm going to do here is tweak it a little bit. Now if you want speed, this cross-zoom effect, by tweaking the center point, works pretty well, but if you want to refine it, I suggest you apply a little bit of blurring. I like this, and it works well, but I wish it was a little softer. And when I apply that cross-zoom, you'll see it pops in one area and pulls out another. In this case, I'm going to say zoom into this bird's head and then pull back out right here. You'll note that you can adjust the duration, but to get better controls, set where it zooms. If you select that effect, you really have very little control. One of the things I dislike about this effect, while it's fast and works well, it tends to get pretty pixelated, because there's no blurring or defocusing. I just want to show you how bad the built-in one is.

Let's just drop this shot down for a second. For example, it would look something like this. For reference, you can make your own cross-zoom effect, but it often becomes pixelated. Now, I like to have a cross-zoom effect where things pop and then the other shot's revealed. In this case, we'll go back to the layered transition stack, and I'll start with a better cross-zoom.

Zoom transition premiere pro