Topic: Video: Snatch - need a little help

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

Paul,

If I understand you correctly, none of that is necessary in Premiere. But, lets talk it through, please. I have not used Vegas, yet. If you take a video that fills a 720x480 screen (DV), and reduce it to half the size, proportionally,  so that the two clips that size will now fit side by side (width), then you have also reduced the height by 50%. In that case, you would have to stretch the height to fill the full space available, while the width is already filled. Thus you would distort the video if you then expanded the height to fill the frame.

I hope this makes sense. I hope I am missing something obvious. This is the problem I have been facing. I could fill the frame, but have chosen not to and instead used a background so that I didn't distort the video. If I am wrong about this, I may have a solution for you which will not require so many renders and so much quality degradation.

Let me know your thoughts. I can seek help from more experienced editors if the answer is something in between our two methods.

[Paul LaDuke]

Chris,

I don't reduce the size of the video.  I am basically cropping the video by using only the middle half of the video.  I crop one side off by panning the video and I crop the other side off by the bmp overlay and chromakey.

I "panned" the video by moving the video frame left or right so that my body was on the desired side of the screen for the entire rep.  This is a static pan of the video.  Most video editors will pan a picture (called the "Burns Effect" named for Ken Burns and his documentary style) to add movement to a still photo.  I am basically just shifting the video so the subject is offset and not in the middle of the frame. This way I can maintain a full screen for better resolution in viewing.

I then used chromakeying effects to crop the unwanted side of the video.  If I wanted the snatch attempt on the right side, I wanted to get rid of the left half of the video and visa versa.  This is why I used the blue and green bmp for chromakey purposes.

If you have any more questions, please ask.  It is difficult to try to write it out with clarity.  It is one of the things that is pretty hands on.

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

Paul,

I think I might see what you mean. It sounds like you are cropping out the area to the left and right of the lifter in order to decrease the width of each video to more closely match the height of one DV video and then proportionally expanding the result to fill the frame. Sound correct? I will give it a shot. It sounds like its a lot easier to do this type of thing in Premiere where you can crop, move, resize, etc videos simply by clicking and dragging, unless I am still missing something.

I appreciate you taking the time to talk me through your technique.

[Paul LaDuke]

Chris,

It sounds to me like you got it!  Man, that was hard to explain, LOL.  Good luck.  I look foward to seeing more video.

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

Paul,

Thanks. Its a good technique. I am embarrassed I didn't think of it before. I am working on several projects right now, but they are all fairly large. I'm not sure when I will complete them, but they are coming.  8)

Happy Friday!