Am I being stupid?
 

Hi All

I need to create an effect for a job and I can't think how to do it in Premiere 6.5 or After Effects 5.0. Sounds simple but...

What I need to do is to show three cropped clips on screen next to each other at once like 3 "slices" of video - the three clips taking up the entire width of the screen. I need to crop each clip and then move it to the left,middle or right position on screen. In all there will be between 5-10 minutes of this with perhaps 50 clips

I've tried :-
- the crop filter (it resizes the video)
- the clip filter (can't move the clip to the left, middle or right positions)
- the picture in picture options - doesn't allow cropping.

I can do 2 layers using the Canopus Storm 3D PiP transition but adding the third using a virtual clip doesn't work.

Any ideas??

Okay, haven't used 6.5 in a while. So I may be all wet on this. But I would have three separate video track, with the videos stacked on each other in each track. Then I would move and crop inside the frame of each video to get the right position. Now I also recall that in 6.5 you had to check a box or something to make the black background transparent so the underlying clips showed throught the cropped out areas. I seem to recall using the keying filter for that.....

Hi Chris

Thanks for your help...

Couldn't find the "make background transparent" option, but got round it anyway. Here's how:-

1. Create 3 black & white images with the area to display in white and the "masked" area in black - one for left , one for middle, one for right.

2. Put each clip on a separate video layer

3. Use the transparency options and select image matte. Select the appropriate black&white file created in 1.

4. Add the "transform" filter to clips to move the clip around within the unmasked area.

It all needs rendering, but I have a happy client and I guess that's the main thing!