Long boring story but I have a very sharp grandson, 3rd grade, and he has some projects where we take well known photos, put them in an app, crop out the top or side or bottom, depending on what he wants to modify, modify that part of the photo in an app (we’re doing this on my iPhone and his iPad) then rejoin the modified part with the original photo to make a single photo. Lots of apps that make that pretty easy and he is quite clever and the he’s used the results in school projects.
We want to do the exact same thing with videos. Download a video, crop part of it out, do modifications to that part, then rejoin them. We have no problem cropping a video and then modifying that in different apps; even Apple’s Photos app will let you easily crop a video. But we can’t find an app that lets us crop a piece off, modify it, then rejoin them. I feel like I must be missing something? What’s the easy way to do this?
Edit: I’m not talking about cropping,say, the middle portion of a video, then rejoining it. I’m talking about taking, say, cropping the top half of a video, modifying it, then reconnecting it with the bottom half. Or one side of it, etc.
It’s kinda complicated as only a 3rd grader can make it (and of course, it has to be HIS way or he’s unhappy.) I’m teaching him some techniques and in one of them we took a photo of an animal, say, a giraffe. I showed him how to cut it in half, I took the bottom half and he took the top half. Starting out he would do things like put a tiger head on the top of the giraffe neck and have me modify the bottom half someway, then we’d swap and I’d modify the top half and he’d modify the bottom. Then we’d put them together and decide which was the funniest/best. Then he invented a game that involved cutting a photo in half, not necessarily an animal, maybe a famous painting or scene etc, and one person modifying the bottom and the other the top, without seeing what each other was doing, and then put them together. He took a couple of tablets to school and showed his teacher and she started using the process for games in their class that were also learning. It is very simple, as there are of course a lot of apps that let you cut a photo in half then rejoin it.
Well, he wanted to do it with short video clips, most 1 or 2 minutes, and I thought OK, there must be apps that let you cut a video in half (as in, top and bottom) and then rejoin them. But I really haven’t found any. I tried to convince him to do it somewhere else but he really, really wants to make it completely analogous to the photo process.
And I admit, I’ve now become kind of obsessed with finding an app that will do this. ;)
OK, it appears that in Powerdirector you can do a split screen top bottom and eliminate the border between them. I got the idea from the suggestion above with iMovie (Thanks!) I’ll see how difficult it is to do on iMovie and that may be the trick. I’ll need to figure out how to cut a short video in half so the two halves match when putting them together again - I can crop the top and save it and then I can try to crop the bottom half at exactly where I cropped the top half. I’m guessing there’s an easier way to do that too. ;)
So, the trick seems to be using the split screen function and making a vertical split screen. I can do this in Powerdirector on my laptop. iMovie on the iPhone won’t do this. Adobe Premiere Rush does it very easily and well with nice adjustments on the phone or tablet.
The problem in every one of these, however, is there is a very thin but visible line between the top and bottom halves. This is with borders turned on. It’s enough to be noticeable and irritating. No idea how to get rid of this.
I can’t say if this is what’s going on here, but I know the crop effect in premiere can have the option to have a little fade around the crop. Not sure if it defaults to that on or not. But that fade can create a disjointed effect when trying to split screen.
Yeah, I’ve used Powerdirector (which is looked down upon by people who spend $700 on video editing software but is amazingly powerful) and taken a video, cut it in half, then put both halves together vertically and selected the “no borders” option in the split scene creator, and there is a fine black line between the two halves. Adobe Premiere Rush on mobile is surprisingly powerful in options, and it makes putting two halves together extremely simple in split screen mode but there is still that fine black line between them that drives me (and my grandson) crazy. It’s challenging to get true technical support for either company to answer the question of whether there is a way to remove it. I am loathe to keep trying different apps to see if one doesn’t. (But I may.)
I apologize for not being much help. Hopefully there’s an answer out there for you (I just tried the Rush crop tool on desktop and it looked seamless). I use this stuff for work (premiere and resolve) and would be really interested to hear what the answer might be if you manage to get tech support that helps.
