fellow fellows,

i was in the need to create a video that displays two video sources in one frame, aka split screen. i tinkered and pondered, trialed and errored, and in the end i was able to accomplish this through rather weird circumstances.

You can view the effect here in a video i cut for a friend:

http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=_kuwpFnCzKs

while the video itself maybe nothing to rave about, it displays the effect around 2/3 in the video (it's ~1min, so you won t wait long anyways). As I said, I could achieve the effect, but I am rather unsure how I did it. I roughly followed these three steps, (though while I wrote down, what I did, I could'nt reproduce this, so there may be a flaw in there):

1. put three clips on top of each other, the upper and the middle clip will be the clips being displayed, the 3rd clip will form the background.
2. add a composite transition to the 2nd clip, so it will be between the 2nd and the 3rd clip, select the transition and choose with the lower left icon "resize=50%". repeat this with the 1st clip, so that there is a transition between the 1st and the 2nd clip. Do the resizing.
3. Change both (or one) transitions to AffineComposite. Maybe redo scaling and positioning, switch back to normal Composite. If you were lucky, you are done.

As I said before, sometimes this results in the split screen effect, sometimes it doesn't. It looks to me like this feature is enabled through a bug when switching from normal composite to Affine and then back to normal results in the "split screen" effect, but on the other hand I am clueless what kind of magic is at work.

For myself I saved one kdelive-file with the working split-screen effect inside, kept the transitions the 'special transition' and just changed the clips in there new videos . If you are interested in using the effect for yourself, i will upload a kdenlive-file for your downloading pleasure. If there is an easy way to achieve the split screen effect and i came to ignore this, feel encouraged to share your knowledge.

ps: there is a wish filled in the mantis bugtracker, which gently asks for an intuitive way of doing split-screen videos. at the time you are viewing this, this may have been implented into kdenlive, so you might want to check:
http://www.kdenlive.org:80/mantis/view.php?id=461

muchos saludos,
Juergen.

Ty. If anyone trying to reproduce this is having a hard time (like i do now), there s is a kdenlive file uploaded to the bugtracker. It works with a more recent version of kdenlive - it might work with the latest versions from svn. If it doesnt, try the version numbers for your compilation as mentioned in the comments of the bugreport.

1. Get it here,
http://www.kdenlive.org:80/mantis/file_download.php?file_id=314&type=bug

2.replace the color clips, with whatever you like.

3. Showcase : )

Hi,

I just downloaded that file and I have no idea where to place it. I thought to place it in the effects folder but it didn't do anything.

Any thoughts?

Thanks! Adding this thread to the list of needed tutorials:
http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/possible-tutorial-subjects

Open the file with kdenlive and use it as starting timeline for your project. It contains the transitions for the split screen effect, just put your own clips to the place where the colored clips are and you are set : )
enjoy,
J.

Might I add that you may need to change the track that it transitions with. In this example, you'll need to change both transition effects to affect track 2

Here's a 4-way picture in picture test video I did recently. Not hard to do once you figure out the correct recipe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J28OrWyLdXQ

It's basically 4 tracks, each track with a composite transition against the always present Black track. Adjust the red rectangle on each transition to cover 1/4 of the white rectangle, and reposition the red rectangles to different corners of the white rectangle.

I attempted to do a 16-way picture in picture video by nesting four 4-way picture in picture projects inside a 4-way picture in picture project, but kdenlive crashes on me :(. I hope that can be fixed in the near future. I filed a bug report for that:
http://kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=1300

Here is a tutorial with some hints on how to handle the composite transition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4vXxRgMiLA
Hope this helps.

Here's an example of a 4 split screen I just finally attempted. It turned out pretty decently if I may say so myself. I used affine instead of composite. I sure wish somehow I could get have the new windows come into their spots (upper right, lower left, lower right) in some cool 3d fashion like flipped open or rotating into view etc. Not sure if that's possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqlaK69z-PU

Create a black image with the format of a bar.
Then use either the composite of the affine transition to move the bar over the picture.