Video Cropping

[Daz]

I have had a search through the forum, but can find nothing on this.

What I am ultimately trying to achieve is to have a film clip showing a person playing chess against himself. What I want to achieve in the editing phase is to get an long/medium shot with a head-to-head scene. I have the two lots of footage (with the same player sitting at either side of the board) and am trying to find a way to fuse the left half of one to the right half of the other.

If I just overlay one video track and set the transparency to 50% I have a nice solid background, but with two ghosts playing chess (not a bad effect and something to think about for a future project!)

I have used the cropping tool to crop the overlay video track to 40% image width on the right hand side, but it fills in the empty space on the left with a solid colour so that when I play back I just have a big black square on the left and one player on the right.

Is there a way in VS8 to set the fill in colour in the cropping tool to be transparent, so that when I overlay the video track the solid background video shows through? If not, does anyone know of a tool or utility that would allow me to export the cropped video file, amend it, and then import it back in?

Any help would be appreciated.

Daz

[Trevor Andrew]

In 'Motion and Filter' Select 'Customize filter'

Removing the tick from the 'Fill Colour' it may be what you are after.

I have not used it, but it seems to work.

[Daz]

Trevor,

I don't think that it does work. If I crop an area of the screen, then deselect the Fill Colour button, the cropped image expands out to full screen size distorting the picture.

Daz

[rich]

Daz,
I was trying to do the same thing and having exactly the same result as you. It doesn't look like it can be done. I would have thought that that would have been the main point of the cropping tool to be used in conjuction with the overlay.The picture distortion, when you uncheck the fill colour, wouldn't be much use to anyone.Maybe the Ulead people made a mistake with this tool. Not that they would admit it. Let us know if you have any joy.
Rich

[Daz]

I ended up using a demo version of some other, more expensive software to achieve the effect. What I had to do is called Colour Keying; I cropped the image and made the outside colour a nice bright green that wouldn't interfere with the main video, overlaid it over the top of the background and set the green as the Colour Key. Hey Presto, the green becomes transparent and the desired effect was achieved. I then rendered the clip into an AVI file and imported it into VS8 for final editing. I could have used the other software (VS MediaPro) to do the whole project, but I don't like the interface as much as VS8.

Daz

[ggrussell]

Daz - the same effect can be achieved in other software using alpha blending by using a simple JPG that is half white and half black. That is one thing about Ulead VS8 that I don't like. Certainly isn't as flexible.

[Petal]

Daz,
I have been having a play around with UVS8 and have worked out a way of having you play chess against yourself. It is a little fiddly, but if you have got this far you won't mind that.
1/ Put one half of your clip on the overlay track, the one featuring the other you.
2/Crop( I used the third from the left on the top row)
3/ make start and finish 50% and stationary and put the dotted line frame around the second half of the clip
4/ remove colour which will stretch your picture
5/back in the overlay track, in the motion choice, expand your overlay clip to fit exactly half the screen - this takes quite a bit of fiddling between project view and back into clip view(motion and filter) but isn't really all that hard.
6/ When you have everything lined up so it looks smooth etc... play project
7/ Voila!!! You have two people playing chess who look strangely alike

What do you think? Let us know if you think this helped.
Petal

[BrianCee]

I think you were on the right track to start with daz, all you need to do after you have unticked the "fill colour" box is simply go back into the 'Motion and Filter' tab and manually resize the image in the preview screen by moving the little yellow boxes so that it only covers half the screen.