combine 2 images

law67 wrote on 10/23/2003, 2:10 PM
I have 2 jpg images, one image of a boy and and one image for a girl. The position of boy and girl in each image is exactly in the center of the image. I place one image at video timeline and the other at video overlay to combine them. Since the boy is overlapping the girl, is there a way to use effect or pan/crop to reposition and rearrange the images to make the boy on the left and girl on the right? THanks.

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 10/23/2003, 3:44 PM
The easiest way would be to use the pan/crop tool.

Unclick the "maintain proportion" box to give yourself more flexibility. Then just drag the cropper box bigger than the still image and simply move it around until the boy is in the position you want. (I assume you're making his background transparent so that you can see the girl in the layer below.) If you have time timeline cursor positioned over this section of the timeline, you can see the results as you move the crop box around in the preview window.

You can do the same thing with the girl in the layer below, but then her background may not fill the frame. (I suppose you could make both their backgrounds transparent and have a video layer beneath them both that would serve as their background.)

Another solution would be to simply manipulate the photos before you put them into your movie in Photoshop (or whatever you're using) -- but I'm sure you know that.
Steve Grisetti wrote on 10/23/2003, 3:49 PM
Oh, and speaking of making portions of a still transparent -- beware that JPEGs are not the best file format for using the chromakey feature on.

JPEGs use a form of compression that tends to leavy raggy breaks between colors. When you use chromakey to make a background of a JPEG transparent, you often get a really jagged edge between the transparent and opaque parts of the image.
IanG wrote on 10/23/2003, 5:51 PM
>JPEGs use a form of compression that tends to leavy raggy breaks between colors. When you use chromakey to make a background of a JPEG transparent, you often get a really jagged edge between the transparent and opaque parts of the image.
I thought that effect was caused by anti-aliasing? I've had problems with flood-fills leaving raggy breaks - could I improve things by saving the offending pictures as gifs first?

Ian G.
Steve Grisetti wrote on 10/24/2003, 8:10 AM
TIFs and BMPs would work better.

GIFs give you a limited number of colors to work with. They work fine for graphics with flat color but, for continuous color graphics (like photos), GIFs are probably not the best choice.

On the other hand, the only liability I've found with JPEGs is that they don't play well with chromakey. Other than that, they make a very acceptable compact photo format.
Frenchy wrote on 10/24/2003, 11:55 AM
law67 & iang -

You're best still picture format would be .png - Sony reps have stated several times on these forums that Vegas/VF/Screenblast is/are optimized for png's - lossless compression.

Frenchy
Steve Grisetti wrote on 10/24/2003, 2:58 PM

Thanks, Frenchy.

I agree. The PNG is an excellent file format -- just not universally compatible.

Glad to see Sony/Sonic Foundry have built their product to make use of it!
IanG wrote on 10/24/2003, 4:53 PM
Frenchy & Grisetti

Thanks for the advice!

Ian G.