FCE HD - Need help making 'picture in picture' movie

[stringtheorist]

I figured this would be a common technique and should be easy to accomplish but I can't find any useful tutorials in the user manual, the Help guide or even on Youtube. I just want to set a small clip within one corner of my main movie. I've got as far as using the wireframe to reduce scale and reposition the small clip but I've no idea what to do next. When I run my movie in the timeline the main movie is all I can see. (In the viewer I only see the small clip.)

Please help. Thanks in advance.

 

[Dr. Rengers]

Drag the small clip from the viewer on top of the current track in the timeline

 

[arjen92]

In the timeline, are the clips above eachother, and more importantly is the smaller one (the one you adjusted with your wireframe) above the normal big clip? If so, it should work.

 

[stringtheorist]

In the timeline, are the clips above eachother, and more importantly is the smaller one (the one you adjusted with your wireframe) above the normal big clip? If so, it should work.

Aha! Well done that man! I didn't know it mattered which way round the tracks were aligned. It's now working. Cheers.

 

[Rizvi1]

Thanks for this. I had been wondering how to do PIP also with FCE 3.5 HD. I'm just getting started with it now. I had it for about a year and a half but never really touched it because for my needs (recording stand-up comedy with my HC1), iMovie was sufficient. But now that I have a Canon XH-A1, I'm hoping to start some more serious projects.

Shahryar

 

[spinnerlys]

If you've already done the "clip on timeline, resize and positioning" thingy, and only can see the clip in the V1 video track, you have to render the timeline to see what you've done.

What colour is the line on the top of the timeline? It's sometimes red, green, blue or orange.

If you know the colour, go to Menu > Sequence > Render ....
There you will see different options for rendering, choose the one matching the colour of the line in the timeline.


PS: FCP is not that good in realtime playback with transparencies and overlays. It's really a shame, as Avid software can handle something like this on a PowerPC G4 with 1GHz and 768MB RAM in realtime, without rendering (except Digital Cut to Tape).