In my latest videosong (shameless product placement :P) I cloned myself to play as a band in the same room. Here is the “how to” for this trick.
This is one very simple special effect. It doesn’t require a green screen, or crazy editing techniques – just make sure you follow those three simple rules:
1/ The camera must be exactly at the same position in every shot, without moving even a millimeter.
2/ Lightning conditions must be constant through the whole shoot.
3/ Your frame must be divided so that each instrument gets its own fixed location in space
I first tried to shoot this using natural light, but I ended up with different lightning in each shot. When putting them together, the seams were clearlyshowing, making this effect … much less special. So I had to record everything again, this time in a totally external-light-proof room. I blocked the windowto deny passage to every one of those pesky sun photons, and requisitioned every lamp I could find around the house to get enough light.
An important point: just like the camera, your light sources must remain totally still during the whole process.
The room, which is in fact only 3 meters by 2, appears bigger thanks to the fisheye lens I used. Here’s a peek at each shot:
In Final Cut, once the shots are synchronized, simply crop them one by one, keeping the first intact as a base. You can also smooth the sides of the cropped shots a bit using the edge feather for betterer integration.
All the cropped shots are layered on top of the ukulele part:
If your camera didn’t move, if the light is identical in each shot, and if you stayed inside each instrument’s part of the frame, this will be the quickest editing job you’ll ever have to do for a videosong.
We’d love to hear about your own video tricks ! You can contact us at: videosongsblog(at)gmail.com
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3 Comments
We just shot our first videosong, and one of the things we’re employing is the split screen as well. I’m thinking that it won’t be as seamless as yours is – which is brilliant, by the way – but we were going for a much grittier style, so it should work out okay.
Really love your video and song though – top notch.
Thank you very much for the tip! I tried cloning in one of my vlogs! I did run into a problem with focus, but that’s because of my camera not having ANY options at all and all focus/light balance is automatic (it’s a photography camera, afterall…can’t have everything!).
A tip? You can’t digitally zoom in after-the-fact with an editor and hope to retain the quality of the video! I am still tinkering with this…I find that zooming in on a shot (only achievable after) is a great way to add motion to the video, but it degrades the quality quite a bit. Any fixes for that?
Thanks again!
Very nice tip. Maybe I’ll try it on my next video :)