Crop and Border Effect Confusion

[Morbott]

Hello, I'm trying out this software to see if I should purchase it.

So, I'm trying to do something and not getting the expected results. I'll try to take you step by step through my process. I hope someone can help me out.

-I have a video of me chatting away, that I want to put over another video. I'll be scaling it down and positioning it in the corner. Fairly straight forward.

-what I would like to do as well though is to crop the video of myself to some thing more reasonable, so I use the crop effect. What I see in the clip preview window is the video cropped but with transparency on either side... like it still exists in the same resolution it started with. I'd assume that when I crop, I'm changing it's resolution.

-when I add the border effect, it doesn't add it to the video in it's cropped state.. it adds it to the video in it's default resolution. SO what you see it the video with empty fields on either side and a border around the whole thing.

How can I get the border to do it's thing around the cropped video?

THank you,

M

[borate]

Drop your background clip onto the timeline

Before you place the clip of yourself on the timeline, double-click it to bring up the effects box...

Border it

Scale it (not crop)

Position it

Drop it onto the overlay track (track 2)

The result should look somewhat like this

[Nationalsolo]

Hi
If no cropping of your own video is not required Borate's solution will work fine.

If on the ther hand you need to crop your image then the border (as you found) still only goes around the full frame.
In this case you will require another couple of steps.

Put your background video on the main video track (Video track 1)
Put a blank frame to the Overlay track (Video track 2) and make it  a suitable coulour for your border. (Note it will cover the main track. (Let's Call this the "border image" ) I made this one green so you could see it.)
Click the FX button for this "border image"and the choose the Crop effect
Crop the "border image" to roughly the required size  and in such a way it is in the corner of the frame
Add your face clip to Video track 3
Click the FX button for Video Track 3 and choose the Crop effect. Crop your face clip the desired amount.
Now add the Scale effect and adjust to the size required
Now add the Position effect and drag it so it sits over the border image in the position required.

Open the "border image" effects pane again and adjust it's crop effect so you have a suitable border around your scaled down image. You can also adjust the face clip position so the border is equal all around.

e.g.

 

Nat

[Morbott]

Hi, and thank you both for your solutions.

In the end I sort of came up with a solution similar to what Nationalsolo suggested.

It's too bad that we have to hack around to get that look, but oh well... it does the trick.

Thanks again for your help.

M