Not so simple video editing question

June 16, 2019 5:09 PM

I need to create a video that shows excerpts from two videos side-by-side. What seems like it should be a simple task is looking impossible due to limitations of the tools I have available. How to proceed?

I have two videos: A and B. I would like to create a new video that shows a side-by-side comparison of material from A and B.

The new video should have what I'll call a display area that will show a title and maybe some captions. Inside this display area would be two framed squares. The square on the left would show footage from video A. The square on the right would show footage from video B.

If video editors worked liked photo editors, this would be trivial. Unfortunately, they don't.

I have iMovie and a fair amount of experience using it. I could afford to get Adobe Premiere Elements if it will make it significantly easier to do this task. Unfortunately I don't think it will. I suspect I'll need Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro to get the job done.

There are several problems with iMovie. The first is that it only allows you to work with clips in 16:9 aspect ratio. If you want to crop a clip, you can crop it down to a portion as long as that portion is still 16:9. It will fill in the borders with black as needed. Great. I can export the movie and then reprocess it with handbrake to remove the black border, but that adds another generation.

The second problem with iMovie is that when you do a picture-in-picture, you can't trim the picture that you're inserting. It shows the whole thing.

The third problem with iMovie that you can only do one picture-in-picture at a time.

So, I believe the workflow in iMovie would be:

1. Crop Video A in iMovie to contain only the portion I want.
2. Export the cropped Video A from iMovie
3. Use handbrake to trim the unwanted borders from Video A
4. Do the same thing with Video B
5. Create a movie with the frame area, captions, and squares to show the cropped portions of Video A and B.
6. Add Video A to the frame area, using Picture-in-Picture.
7. Export the partially finished video from iMovie.
8. Create a new iMovie project with this partially finished video as the main clip.
9. Add Video B to its square using Picture-in-Picture.
10. Export the final video from iMovie

I'm done. But who knows what the quality will be like after the various clips have been re-rasterized over and over again so many times.

I haven't used Premiere Elements, so I don't know exactly how it would be done with that tool. I gather it is also limited to one Picture-in-Picture at a time. I don't know whether it lets me crop the picture that I'm dropping in to an arbitrary aspect ratio.

So, I guess the question is whether there's a straightforward way to do this in Premiere Elements, in iMovie, or in some other consumer-priced tool for the Mac (or the iPad, I guess).

Secondary question is whether this would indeed be straightforward with Final Cut Pro and/or Premiere Pro.

Many thanks!

posted by Winnie the Proust to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

Response by poster: And maybe the third question is whether there's better vocabulary and standard terms to describe what I'm trying to do. It seems to be something that happens in pretty much every news, sports, and entertainment broadcast ever.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:10 PM on June 16, 2019

Premiere will make this very easy. I don't recall the exact workflow but you should be able to put the two source videos in video tracks one above the other, then simply crop one off halfway (or mask it, there are various ways to do this IIRC). That will leave half of the top video showing on whichever side you choose and the opposite half of the video lower in the mix. If you want to add captions they go in an effects layer that sits on top of both.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 5:20 PM on June 16, 2019

Response by poster: When you say "Premiere" do you mean "Premiere Elements" or the pro version?
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:39 PM on June 16, 2019

I think you can do it in latest version of powerpoint by placing them side by side and choosing start and end points, and autoplay in the video tab bar.
posted by b33j at 6:49 PM on June 16, 2019

It looks like this is definitely possible in Elements, as a split screen:

Adobe forums question from 2014 on how to show video side by side

The answer quotes a 2011 explanation, so it's possible the interface has changed enough since then that the directions won't be exactly right, but it should get you most of the way there, I think.
posted by current resident at 7:14 PM on June 16, 2019

I think Elements should be fine, stacking video tracks is a pretty elementary task — I don't mean you're silly to ask, just that it's something that would be considered a fundamental capability, not a "pro" one. You can probably buy a month of Elements or Creative Suite or whatever for very little, but there are also free video editing apps like OpenShot and Shotcut if you'd like to give them a try first.

The interfaces for these things can be pretty daunting, FYI, I get lost whenever I have to do a little video project. But there should be plenty of how-tos out there.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 7:26 PM on June 16, 2019

Since you mention editing photos, you can do this kind of thing in Photoshop. Just open your videos in photoshop and use the normal tools to crop and move things around, and then export.
posted by gregr at 7:42 PM on June 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is very easy to do with Camtasia, which might be cheaper than other products (they also offer a free 30-day trial).
posted by neushoorn at 12:18 AM on June 17, 2019

The learning curve will be steeper but if you're really looking to save money you can certainly do this in DaVinci Resolve, which includes a very powerful but free professional video editor. The biggest difference may be that its titling tools (for putting text on the screen) are nowhere near as easy/intuitive as Premiere Pro's, but the overall process would be pretty similar. You would drag both of your videos to the timeline, one on top of the other, and then set the parameters for scale and position to make them display side by side at an appropriate size. You'd create a third layer for each block of text you need, type in the text you want to appear on screen, and then (again) scale it and position it. You might need a fairly powerful system (think GPU acceleration) for this to work well, depending on the resolution of the video you're working with, and the title design tools can be a little archaic, but it's a high-powered video editor and it's free. Probably works best if you have a GPU that can provide some degree of acceleration.
posted by Mothlight at 8:11 AM on June 17, 2019

Oh, and I don't know how serious you are about doing this on the iPad, but there's an excellent video editor for the iPad called LumaFusion that happens to be on sale for 15 bucks right now. I think it will also do what you want -- check out this video tutorial. I assume the editing experience will be better on more recent iPads, but I was really impressed by it.
posted by Mothlight at 8:16 AM on June 17, 2019