You all might remember the fantastic Labor Day race that Doug Makishima and I had. A lot of people had seen both in-car videos and thought it would be fun to see them together. So did I.

But, of course, I didn’t really know how to do it with Windows Movie Maker, which is what I use for all of my videos. Mostly, I use WMM because it’s free, it’s already on my work laptop (which is plenty powerful enough to do this stuff, unlike my home desktop, which is getting so long in the tooth that we never even turn it on anymore), and it’s brain-dead simple to use.

Of course, brain-dead simple means that you can’t do much fancy stuff with it, like picture-in-picture, side-by-side, etc. Or so I thought.

Last night during my nightly web-surfing, I read something somewhere that said that it was possible to do picture-in-picture in WMM with a plugin. A plugin? I didn’t even know there were plugins for WMM. So, off to Google I went, and sure ’nuff, there’s an almost-free plugin called PIP Plus that claimed to be able to do this. Free for 15 days, and only $8 after that. Cheap enough for me.

It’s very short on documentation but comes with some samples. WMM supports two types of special effects: “effects”, which apply for the duration of a video clip, and “transitions”, which affect the way the movie switches from one clip to another. The way to do PIP in WMM is to transition from one clip to another for the entire duration of the clips, and during the transition, PIP2 lets you control how each of the clips display (position, size, etc.)

You drive it by hand-editing XML. Fun. You have to restart WMM every time you make a change to the XML file, then delete the old transition, and apply the new one. Then you have to line up the two clips so that they are aligned. Pain in the ass, but that’s what I get for being cheap. Adobe Premier probably makes this all trivial.

Complicating matters, my video is 16:9, and Doug’s is 4:3. So I went through lots of trial and error. But after several iterations, I think I got it. It’s not perfect. There’s some extra video at the beginning and the end. It’s only the first 4 laps of the race because that’s all Doug’s camera managed to get, for some reason. I left both audio tracks playing simultaneously (although I know how to do other things), but I didn’t know what the right thing to do was.

The video is embedded here below, or full-sized in the gallery.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 1:18 pm and is filed under SCCA, Videos.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.