The above video prior to being converted to a flash video (flv) format, was created on a windows xp system using a custom aviscript (Avisynth required) . The video was rendered using VirtualDub. ffdshow is installed on my system and so was configured within Virtualdub to create a DV encoded avi file. Full audio processing was applied to convert the audio to PCM (no compression). If users are new to Avisynth my Avisynth Introduction Guide For New Users may prove useful
I’ve been exploring PIP or “picture in picture”effects using Avisynth and intend devoting my next few posts to this often requested effect. To start with I’m just looking at the most basic scripts that will place a pip video with a coloured border in the corner of the main video – Four scripts for four corners. The duration of the rendered video will be set by the length of the the main video. The audio utilised will also be that of the main clip. I’ve made a project folder available for download that contains the four scripts and a couple of short test videos. As always, the test videos are included so that a user may immediately test the scripts on their system as a confidence measure before replacing the test videos with their own creation. The download is a zip file and users are advised to extract its contents in to an empty folder
The scripts are designed to be easily customisable using something like notepad to open them or my preferred option AVSP. The border colour may be altered by changing the HEX Triplet code within the script ( A very useful reference for HEX colour codes may be found on this Wikipedia page ). The border thickness may also be altered
The scale and position of the pip video are easily customisable . I have adopted percentage settings where the placement and scale of the pip video is relative to the main video – expressed as a percentage. A snippet of the script is shown below and these are some of the parameters a user may wish to adjust. Setting the PipWidthPercentage and PipHeightPercentage dimensions to 50 would result in a pip video half the size of the main video (ie 50%) . Setting the PipTopPercentage and PipLeftPercentage both to 10 would result in the pip being placed a tenth of the way down from the top of the main video and a tenth of the way across from its left hand side (ie 10%).
###USER SETTINGS##############
MainVideo= “mainvideo.wmv”
PipVideo= “pipvideo.wmv”
PipWidthPercentage=40
PipHeightPercentage=40
PipTopPercentage=55
PipLeftPercentage=5
BorderThickness=10
BorderColour=$FFFFFF
###END OF USER SETTINGS########