Crop video in a circle.

[Droid305]

Hello, I am trying to make a video for my Church. My uncle is letting me use his computer to do it while he is gone, and he has power director. I'm new at editing, but I took 2 years of Communication Arts (movie class) in High School.

So my question is how do I crop a movie, and then use it on another project. I have two needs for this.

1) I want to make a bubble pop up with someone talking. It would like something like my picture I made.

The guy would float from the right side of the screen, to the left at some point also.

2) In the raw footage, someone walked into the frame, just poked their head in. Then turned around. I know if this was photo shop and I had to pictures of the same take, I could select the good parts of the picture, and put it on the bad. Because I was using a tripod, and I have seconds of good video without them there, is there any way I could just select a circle of a square of the good footage, and put it over the head poking in? The shot was really hard to get, and I don't like the head there.


Thanks!

If there is another video editing software that might do the trick or has the ability to do it, let me know and I will see if I can get my hands on it through a friend.

[jagabo]

Just about every NLE will let you overay one video over another with a mask. You can even do it with free tools like VirtualDub and AviSynth.

[budwzr]

If you can't imagine it, you won't be able to do it. It's called "cookie cutter" in some software. Or you can make your own.

[jagabo]

Since the background in your image was fairly symmetrical I used a horizontally flipped image as an overlay. I quickly built a mask in a paint program. Then used the following script to overlay the flipped image onto the original:

src=ImageSource("1qn1xs.jpg") 
flipped=FlipHorizontal(src)
mask=ImageSource("mask.png") 
Overlay(src, flipped, 0, 0, mask)

result:


mask:

[budwzr]

Don't freak out, OP!

That example above is just the very essence of what you need to understand. The actual implementation in your NLE is much more friendly.

The concept is, white is "high" and black is "low", and the NLE will blend in the gradient. The gradient is the fuzz around the circle. To produce a soft blend, rather than a harsh hard circle.

Just think about it for a while.