0.8 kdenlive; stock install from AV Linux 5 Live-DVD (Debian)

New to kdenlive. Beware also possible wrong use of terms; please correct where necessary.

I wish to use picture-in-picture. However, only *part* of one picture within another picture (`talking head' extracted from clip of 4 people, and embedded within intro clip).

I've seen that it is possible to use picture-in-picture using the `composite' effect, and also that effects can be combined. The `crop' effect seemed, from it's name, most likely to allow the talking-head to be used but--as far as I can tell--it allows only for a couple of effects to be applied *inside* a region of a clip. I need to be able to select a region & mask out everything else, then apply that as a picture-in-picture.

Is this possible?

I /think/ this is called rotoscoping, not used my self

Announcement of this new feature here http://kdenlive.org/users/ttill/rotoscoping

@moorsey: thanks for your response - you seem to be the only one doing so!

I investigated rotoscoping and, whilst it probably *could* do what I wanted, (AFAICT) it is designed for animation & is much more complicated than I want.

In the latest SVN that I am using, crop is now completely inoperative.

The `Crop & Scale' | `Scale & Tilt' effect will do what I want. Careful not to touch the Scale or Tilt controls.

no problem!

yeah, crop is funny for me also, I can crop left and right, but not top and bottom

latest svn, scale and tilt controls all working here

At least you found something to do the job, good stuff

@moorsey: "I can crop left and right, but not top and bottom"

As best as I can tell, it is--in certain combinations of settings--zooming the cropped scene to fill the remaining space. That is a bit odd, as it is *not* called `Crop & Zoom'.

Personally, I consider this effect to be currently inoperable. A damn shame. Clearly what it needs is to have the in-monitor controls added, such as Pan & Zoom has. And just to Crop, rather than auto-scale up.

I've discovered the following for the first time:
http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/poor-quality-pan-and-zoom-affine-composite#comment-6342

"by intentional design, Crop, when applied to a clip _not_ being composited will scale. What you want to do, then, is apply Crop to the upper clip of two clips with the Composite transition between them. In the Composite transition parameters, do not adjust the size of the compositing rectangle, just its position."

Wouldn't it be lovely to have some documentation.

The Crop effect was not really designed to be used in tandom with compositing. It was designed primarily for removing bad edges of an image where you want the result scaled automatically to fill the frame. Also, you can use it for center-cropping to make mismatching aspect ratios fill the frame completely.

The Scale and Tilt effect contains a cropping that behaves better with Composite. It is named Scale and Tilt because, well, the developer of that plugin named it that way. (Actually, he named it scale0tilt, and Kdenlive devs renamed it "Scale and Tilt" when perhaps it should be "Crop, Stretch, and Shift").