HP's pic-in-pic effect

Chienworks wrote on 8/7/2005, 1:56 PM

The velocity envelope is a nifty little tool that lets you alter the speed of the video playback as if you had a speed control knob under your fingers, letting you continuously speed up or slow down the video. It's fun and useful, but not necessary for this effect.

You could instead save a snapshot of the frame by using the floppy disk button over the upper right corner of the preview frame, crop the image, then bring this snapshot file back into the timeline on an upper track. Unless you find ways of creatively combining multiple "snapshots" into single files, you'll be limited to two snapshots at a time. It shouldn't be difficult to pile up more, but it will be time consuming.

I believe the full version guide to this effect uses track motion to move the snapshots around on the screen. You don't have that either in the Studio version, but Pan/Crop should do the job. Just remember that Pan/Crop works backwards of track motion: if you want to move the image up then drag the frame down, if you want to move it left, drag right.

dibbkd wrote on 8/7/2005, 4:17 PM

Thanks for the tips, I got it working (not mastered, but working) by saving the snapshot, cropping my head and saving that as a separate file.

Then I basically panned it across the screen as I move my hand to the right like I was moving the picture.

Neat effect.

Now I'm going to redo the video, clean it up a bit, and try it again.

Chienworks wrote on 8/7/2005, 4:34 PM

When you get it done, post it on my site so we can all see your genius production. :)

http://www.vegasusers.com/vidshare/

Storyman wrote on 8/7/2005, 7:02 PM

The trick was accomplished with Pinnacle's Commotion Pro. It's pretty much like After Effects.

dibbkd wrote on 8/7/2005, 7:39 PM

I'm getting an empty picture frame tomorrow, will redo it with that to make the effect look better.

BTW - I checked out some videos on your site, pretty cool, and gave me quite a few ideas for my own videos now... Oh, and I did post one video slideshow.

Oh, and no offense to storyman, but I will never use another Pinnacle product ever. I almost gave up on video editing after using Pinnalce Studio 8/9, until one day I figured I'd download the free trial of Vegas Studio and have loved it ever since... not a single crash yet!

:)

dibbkd wrote on 8/7/2005, 8:56 PM

Almost have this effect down... but now I'm having an issue with the panning of my cropped head.

I have a small jpg of my head, and I'm basically going to pan it from right to left across the screen.

The thing is now, on the pan/crop tab, I can only bring the head jpg about up to barely my shoulders, and can't get it to go all the way up to where my head should be.

It's like there's a border setting or something now allowing me to pan the image near the edge of the screen. Does this make sense?

allyn wrote on 8/7/2005, 10:04 PM

here's a video from nbc dateline with stone phillips about how the hp effect was done.

http://www.vmsdigital.com/MyFiles.aspx?Onum=3145298C-4ACE-45C2-8812-15BDD989E500

dibbkd wrote on 8/8/2005, 4:31 AM

Thanks for link, that was cool.

I would still like some help if anyone knows how to make an object (my head) be able to pan to the top of the screen, it's like there are 2" borders I can't go past.

IanG wrote on 8/8/2005, 3:14 PM

Have you used pan and crop to adjust the size of your head jpg? If so, try grabbing the blue F and moving it down a bit. If not, can you describe what you've done in more detail, please?

Ian G.

dibbkd wrote on 8/8/2005, 5:30 PM

Yes, I have used pan/crop to make the size of my head correct. I can grab the blue F and move it up and down, but it doesn't go all the way to the edge of the border as far as I need it to.

IanG wrote on 8/9/2005, 3:12 PM

It looks like VMS has this problem (bug?) if you use pan & crop to shrink an image too much. If you add the cookie cutter "picture in picture" effect to your head jpg you might be able to get the effect you want. I can get a small image to the edge of the picture that way, but you'll need to experiment. Good luck!

Ian G.

Chienworks wrote on 8/9/2005, 4:52 PM

There is an odd "feature" (i won't call it a bug, but it does make me wonder what the programmers were thinking ...) in Vegas with Pan/Crop. The problem is that when moving a smaller image around, it will only show up in a rectangle that fills the frame with the same shape as the cropped image. For example, if you have a frame that is 600x400 (using simple numbers as an example) and crop an image to 150x200, this creates a "sub frame" 300x400 within the full 600x400 frame. This "sub frame" is centered in the big frame with 150 wide borders on either side. No matter what you do with the small image when you pan it around the frame, it will only appear within this "sub frame" and will be chopped off if you move outside this area.

I can only think of three ways around this.

1) Crop the image to the same proportions as the full frame. This means the image will be the same shap. This doesn't always help as sometimes you want to work with a tall narrow image in a wide short frame. Cropping to the same proportions often just isn't what you want to use.

2) Use Track Motion instead of Pan/Crop. This does not have the limitation of Pan/Crop. It can only be used in the full version of Vegas though, so it doesn't help if you are using the studio version. There are also some image quality concerns to deal with.

3) Pad the cropped image with transparent pixels to make it the same proportions as the frame. In the example above, if the image is cropped to 150x200, add extra space on the sides to make it 300x200 and make the extra space transparent. You'll have to save it as a file type that supports transparency, such as .gif, .tif, .png, or .tga. This image can then be panned anywhere in the larger frame since the "sub frame" that is created fills the entire frame. The transparent areas will allow the background to show through. The only cons i see with this method is that it's a little more work and you've gotta do the math.

Anyway ... check out http://www.vegasusers.com/vidshare/textdisp?dibbkd-testing_picinpic9 to see how well Kevin did! :)

Lawrence wrote on 8/9/2005, 7:02 PM

Doing this in the new Vegas MovieStudio 6 with track motion and no limit keyframes
is lot more easy. download the demo and try it. Install Satish PluginPac 3D LE,
you can do 3D Motion at event level.

dibbkd wrote on 8/9/2005, 7:17 PM

Chien! That was it, and man, I was about to go crazy trying to figure that one out... I made that video I posted earlier by not moving the frame around to much, and standing closer to the camera, but now, I can do it with all the freedom of moving I need to!

If I fix up my video, can I repost it to your site and replace the one I posted a few days ago?

BTW - What I ended up doing was making a transparent background of 640x480, which is the size of my video.

This did two things for me, no math to figure out, and it also makes the object (frame with my head) the correct size without me having to pan out to shrink it so much.

lanG - I tried the cookie cutter effect, never could get it to work the way I needed to for this, but thanks for that and the other advice!

Lawrence, I had seen that the full Vegas 6 had the 3D track motion, which I really really want, but don't have the $ now to spend. I'm afraid if I download the demo I'll be crying later when I can't buy it.

:)