Tethering

faisal_ahmed786 wrote on 8/3/2015, 3:20 PM

Hi.

I wish to tether a video or image. See this video for example:

At the start the small video appears as a square box over the main video. Instead of this, I want it to blend in. i.e. the edges are slightly faded or fuzzy.

Is it possible to do this in Pro X?

Comments

johnebaker wrote on 8/3/2015, 4:39 PM

The technique you are referring to is called Picture in Picture (PIP).

MEP has a set of PIP templates available on the Effects tab, Design elements, Picture in picture.

What you want to do is not covered by these templates, however it is easy to do as folows:

In an image editing program you need to create a mask such as this and save it as a jpg - I would suggest making it 1920 x 1080pixels.

.
In MEP set up your background / main video on track 1
Place the mask you created on track 2
Place the video to be inset on track 3
Resize the video or image on track three - Effects, Movement effexts, Size / position and drag it the location you require
Select the mask on track 2 and the select Video efects, Chroma key, Alpha - make sure the arrow on the mask points down as shown below
Resize the mask as required and reposition over the video in the preview monitor - you may need to refine the size and position to get what you want.

The tracks should look something like this

and here is a still shot of the result

The inserted picture is highlighted in red

HTH

John EB

browj2 wrote on 8/3/2015, 8:03 PM

Hi,

There are a couple of ways to do this, but they get down to what John E Baker indicated.

Here is another way. Create a simple white rectangle with a feathered edge. Make it quite large, like about 600 px high by 400 wide. I used Xara for this. Export it as a transparent png file with the name masksomething_alpha.png. Appending _alpha will cause it to become automatically an alpha mask.

Since I did one, here is the link.

See below for how I made it and how to use it. Just drag it to the correct location and resize if necessary.

I used a blue foreground instead of another video or image so that you could clearly see the featheredging. The arrangement is not standard and you have to flip the arrow on the mask so that it's black and not white.