After Effects Magnifying Glass

Skill Level: Easy

Version: AE 7 or later

Movie Sample: View Flash Video (pops)

Plug-ins Used: No third party plug-ins used

Create a new composition (320 x 240, duration 10:00).
Insert both the birds.mov and the magnifying glass.ai into the composition.
Select your magnifying glass layer and hit A to bring up the Anchor point set the value to 56.0, 56.5 reason behind this is so that when we write the expression for bulge center the bulge center will be linked to the middle of our magnifying glass.
With the birds.mov layer selected go to Effect – Distort – Bulge to add the bulge filter.
Set Bulge height to about 1.8.
Select the magnifying glass layer and hit P and Shift S to pull up both position and scale.
Select the birds layer and hit E to bring up the effects click the little arrow next to bulge to open up that filters options.
Option/Alt click the stop watch next to Bulge Center to add an expression to it.
Select the pick wipe (the middle icon that kind of looks like a pigs tail) and drag it to the magnifying glass position.
Option/Alt click the stopwatch next to Horizontal and Vertical Radius and link them to the corresponding scale values on you magnifying glass you will need to divide both of these values by 2 so your expression should look like this
```
thisComp.layer("Magnifying glass.ai").scale[0]/2
```
Set keyframes for both position and scale on your magnifying glass and enjoy.

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