[spiky_dog]

hello all,

i want to do video compositing, or at least i think that's the proper term. in particular i have 4 source video files and i want to make one video out of all of them.

the videos would not be played in sequence, as could be done in iMovie, but instead would be going simultaneously, two of them side by side with a small "picture in picture" of the other two at the lower right corner of each. (if it helps to visualize this the videos are footage of in car and outside of car views of the rallycross runs of me and my co-driver, and i want to have them synced to the "5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go!" of the starter so as to visually show where time was gained and lost.)

my question is what application i need to do this. iMovie won't. i don't think Final Cut Express will. will Final Cut Pro do the trick? how about anything open source? i looked very briefly at jahshaka but couldn't make heads or tails of its interface, let alone how to do what i want to do.

[Uncle Skeleton]

QuickTime Pro. Open all the movies, and copy each of 3 in turn, Edit -> Add them to the fourth (moving the playhead back to the beginning before each add). Then open Movie properties, select each track, go to Visual Settings, and go nuts. Very easy and fast.

[spiky_dog]

thanks for the reply. i have had quicktime pro for years and had no idea that it could offset and scale movies like this. sweetness.

the only hurdle i had to overcome was the usual one of demuxing the mpeg video (bb-demux), converting the mpeg audio to aiff (madplay), exporting the mpeg video to h.264, and then joining the audio and video before overlaying 'em.

the video is here, just for the record:

prg rallycross - september 24, 2006 (click on fourth thumbnail then on resulting image. 140 MB)

[Uncle Skeleton]

All that converting stuff is easier now with MPEG StreamClip. It even has a batch function.

Nice video

[Moon Potato]

Final Cut Pro works great for stuff like this, but I'm sure there's a cheaper way to get the job done.