how do I contatinate two clips merging them smoothly? which soft to use?

[grishashvili]

Hi dear All,

So, say I have two video clips, the fist one ends with me sitting on a sofa, holding a glass, looking at the camera. Second clip starts with the same picture, everything is the same, only it filmed next day, so the picture is not identically the same. Of course I wear the same clothes, lighting is the same, I make the same stupid face. But...

How do I merge these two clips into one so that the transition from one to another is not noticeable ?

I'm thinking it is possible somehow, there's gotta be a tool somewhere that does that. May be there is some tool that say takes 100 last frames from the movie 1 and 100 first frames from movie 2, finds a best matching pair, and morphs them somehow...

Anyone, please, any ideas?

Thanks a lot
Henry

[guns1inger]

Any editing program can do it via simple cross fade, assuming you have set the camera on a tripod and everything is exactly the same in both scenes. If they are only slightly out then you can shift one scene to better fit the other, and yes, perhaps even use a morphing program to make small adjustments.

I don't know of anything that will automate this for you, but it really isn't that difficult to do by hand.

That said, unless you have a damn close match to begun with, you are never going to get a smooth transition anyway.

[grishashvili]

Any editing program can do it via simple cross fade, assuming you have set the camera on a tripod and everything is exactly the same in both scenes. If they are only slightly out then you can shift one scene to better fit the other, and yes, perhaps even use a morphing program to make small adjustments.

I don't know of anything that will automate this for you, but it really isn't that difficult to do by hand.

That said, unless you have a damn close match to begun with, you are never going to get a smooth transition anyway.

Thanks guns1inger

Actually, automation is exactly what I need, for the stuff we do we'll need hundreds of those merges. What packages do you think I should be looking at? Are there any video editing packages for Linux that have some sort of morph tools?

Thanks again
Henry

[guns1inger]

Don't know, but if you want to morph them you may well have to cut the start and end clips, morph them together, then splice them back in using an editor afterwards.

If you have a big budget, Shake has a morphing module.

If you don't need to go as far as morphing, Cinelerra probably has all the tools you need to make adjustments to get your images aligned and to do the transition.