ZoomAssist Pro
Premiere Pro plugin

The itch

Punch-zooms are one of the most used moves in modern editing and one of the most tedious to build by hand. Every time you want one, you are setting keyframes, easing them, and checking the result, for a move that should take two seconds.

I wanted the tool to exist, so I built it. ZoomAssist Pro creates smooth, still fully editable punch-zoom keyframes in seconds inside Premiere Pro. The keyframes are real keyframes, so an editor can take over at any point.

Built solo with Claude

I am a designer and photographer by training, not a plugin engineer. The plugin exists because AI-assisted development let me work in a technical domain I had never touched: Adobe's extension platform, its packaging rules, its signing and review process.

That is the honest version of AI-first development. It does not make the domain knowledge unnecessary; it makes it acquirable while you build. I still had to understand why a build failed review, and I still had to be the one who decided what good felt like in the timeline.

Shipping the whole thing, not just the code

• Full brand identity for the product: name, mark, colour, type, tone.
• Designed and built the landing page, with the visual narrative that shows what the plugin does before a word is read.
• Produced and edited the tutorial and demo videos.
• Published and licensed it on Adobe Creative Cloud through Adobe Exchange, including the review process.
• Wrote and maintain a public changelog, so users can see exactly what changed and when.
• Wrote the docs, the FAQ and the support flow.

Released free, and maintained

I decided to distribute it free. It has passed 600 downloads, and because real editors use it on real projects, real issues surface. Two bugs have been reported and fixed since launch, both shipped as updates with changelog entries.

That loop, release, listen, fix, publish, is the part most side projects skip. It is also the part that turns a demo into a product.