Cropping or zooming to get good 1080p result

[mavictk]

I want to record ships in a channel but they are a bit too far for me to retain VLOS. What are my alternatives if I want a good 1080p result. Here is what I think but am unsure of the ramifications:
1. Set the camera to 5.4K 30 fps and record noting that zoom is not available at this resolution. If I do this then how do I use Davinci Resolve (DR) to import the video but only retain the "center" 16:9 1080p data? In other words how do I prevent and up or down scaling in DR and just use the video cropped to the center.
2. Set the camera to 4k 30 fps and zoom 4x. Does the Air 2S up or down scale the image to keep it 4K?

Maybe you can tell that I am looking for a technique on my Air 2S or DR to essentially zoom by using 4k or 5.4 K and only using a part of the image in the center whick should be full resolution 1080p. I just don't know when technology in the Air 2S or DR is scaling and affecting the quality.

I hope this question made sense.

 

[Dave Maine]

Import the full 5.4K file and put it on a timeline. Then using the crop tool to get the zoom effect you want.

 

[Ralph thompson]

Crop or zoom on the Timeline so you get the view you want visually. Then when you output select 1080p in the drop-down menu.

 

[rjwmorrell]

I want to record ships in a channel but they are a bit too far for me to retain VLOS. What are my alternatives if I want a good 1080p result. Here is what I think but am unsure of the ramifications:
1. Set the camera to 5.4K 30 fps and record noting that zoom is not available at this resolution. If I do this then how do I use Davinci Resolve (DR) to import the video but only retain the "center" 16:9 1080p data? In other words how do I prevent and up or down scaling in DR and just use the video cropped to the center.
2. Set the camera to 4k 30 fps and zoom 4x. Does the Air 2S up or down scale the image to keep it 4K?

Maybe you can tell that I am looking for a technique on my Air 2S or DR to essentially zoom by using 4k or 5.4 K and only using a part of the image in the center whick should be full resolution 1080p. I just don't know when technology in the Air 2S or DR is scaling and affecting the quality.

I hope this question made sense.

I don't use Resolve, but I do use the less capable Wondershare Filmora 12, and it has a zoom (along with pan & zoom) tool, and you can easily set the aspect ratio to whatever you want. I often shoot in 5.4K or 4K and crop down using that, do I can only imagine Resolve must have a similar feature since I assume it has way more capabilities.

From 4K to 1080p, I understand you can crop into about 1/4 of the image size without losing quality.

However, I'm still learning so experiment at your own risk.

 

[mavictk]

I found that Davinci Resolve has the capability in project setting to bring in the video at the project settings specification, 1080p in my case, and center the video based upon the resolution. It works like a charm.

I went out and filmed some ships in 5.4k resolution and successfully outputted a 1080p video just like I wanted.