Editing a 30 minute two-headed debate

[meshuken]

I am taping a debate. The end-product I am looking for is to have the program switch back and forth between the two heads as each makes their point. I will have two DV cameras, each taping one person's head (will be using only audio from one of them).

It appears there are several ways to edit this quickly - does anyone have any experience doing this type of a show?

My initial plan was to drop the footage from camera 1 into the Video Track and drop the footage from camera 2 into the Overlay Track.

I would then keep the Video Track intact (including sound) and simply clip out parts of the Overlay Track and remove the cut-outs.

When I tried this it appears that you cannot use the cut option (that is the little pair of scissors) on anything in the Overlay Track. I can only get the scissors to work for cutting pieces of the Video Track out.

I was then thinking to do the reverse, cut out pieces of the Video Track and remove them, but any gag that I leave is immediately closed by VS9. Sure, I could substitute an identically sized "color" fill but that would be pretty laborious, not to mention requiring precise measurements again and again.

I'm sure this is a fairly common project - does anyone have any experience with something similar and how did you accomplish it?

Thanks,

Mike

[rguthrie]

meshuken,

Here's one possible solution. Start a new project and take the video that will become the overlay track and put it onto the Video track and select Multi-Trim. Now multi-trim so that you have made video segments of not only the video that you want to keep but also the video that you don't (where the person's not talking). When you're finished click OK and you should have you're entire video made into "clips". Now press CTRL-A to select all of the clips and move them to the Overlay Track. Now you can bring simply select and delete the segments you don't want and everything stays in place!

Hope this helps,
Ron G.