One thing neither iMovie nor QuickTime Player Pro seem to have on the Mac is the ability to create a second “channel” or “track” and paste / drag / import a different video clip or .mov file and merge them down so as to have them superimposed on playback.
NOTE: I don’t mean “sequence a and then a transition to sequence b”; I mean both sequences playing simultaneously, semi-transparently, superimposed on each other, morphed into a single video sequence. Hope that made sense. The video equiv of opening two image files in Photoshop, pasting image 2 into a new layer of image 1 and then playing with the layer transparency.
I’m not interested in shelling out for anything high end just for this functionality.
Can anyone recommend a simple shareware, freeware, or low-end commercialware app that does this trick?
I have not done this. However, I seem to recall reading of others doing very similar operations… In Photoshop. I don’t know how one opens a movie file in Photoshop, but if it can handle any movie format, it’d probably be Quicktime (which is basically just a stack of ordinary 2-d JPEG images).
They must have had some 3rd party filter of some sort. My copy of Photoshop CS won’t let me select a .mov file when I go File:Open. Hmm, I suppose I could try drag-and-drop… nope, that doesn’t work either.
Someone pointed out to me that QuickTime Pro itself supports this natively, using plain-old QuickTime Player. Select All, Copy, open second movie, select all, go to Edit menu, Add to Selection and Scale, get Movie Properties, fool around with the transparency settings of each video track (there will now be 2 of them) in the Video tab until you get what you want.