Five Ways to Produce a Picture in Picture!
This page is a companion to my page reviewing Pinnacle Studio Ultimate and Avid Studio Ultimate video editing software.
Exploring Avid Studio, I found five different modules which produce picture-in-picture effects, all under the 2D-3D heading in Avid's Effects Editor. These modules have many features in common, but also important differences.
An advantage of having these modules is that some are easier to use, and others provide a wealth of options.
It is important to know about all of these modules in order not to be caught up with one of them which lacks a desired feature. Another may have it.
There is an additional Multi-Shape PIP module, which can produce a polygonal or star-shaped PiP, but it is different enough that I'm not covering it here.
The Differences
The table below lists the parameters of each of each of the five modules. Some parameters have different ranges and work in opposite directions in different modules. I suspect that this results from the need to achieve compatibility when converting data from different legacy applications.
Some general comments about each of the modules:
- 2D Editor Advanced isn't as advanced as its name suggests. It has the fewest features of any of these modules except Studio PiP.
- 2D Editor CPU offers many ways to control borders and a wide range for positioning and resizing. There is also a long list of "quality" settings, essentially affecting the appearance of focus or defocus.
- 3D Editor CPU is the most versatile of all of these modules, including almost all capabilities of all the others, and some additional ones as well. It can get complicated, especially if you use the Camera function.
- 3D Editor GPU, while being much less complicated than 3D Editor CPU, shares with it the very useful ability to rotate an image around ahorizontal or vertical axis, or a point (or in-between axes, by using more than one at the same time). Rotating around a horizontal axis allows an intuitive transition between a rear-view-mirror view and a looking-the-rear view, very useful in my traffic videos. Repositioning the axisway from the center enbles "flipping pages" or "swinging gates" effects.
- Studio PiP is the least capable of these modules. Its parameters are like those of the PinP function in Pinnacle Studio, through Version 15. Particularly unfortunate is that the height and width parameters cannot be linked to one another, even though it is usual to resize an image by the same amount in both height and width.
Some parameters of these modules are available as other independent modules; for example, pan and zoom and Rotate, both available under the Camera heading.
Be careful in choosing which module you will use. Avid Studio offers no way to convert among these modules.
Avid allows cascading of effects, but generally it is best to use only a single module to perform as many functions as possible, especially when changing the shape, rotation or size of an image -- requiring resampling the image, and with each resampling, there is a loss of image quality. To what extent Avid minimizes the number of resamplings, I don't know. Determining this would require either detailed research, or a knowledge of the inner workings of the software.
So that comparable parameters are seen side by side in the table below, they are not always listed in the same order in which they appear in the Effects Editor, Also, parameters may not occur at the same outline level in different modules.
The pairs of numbers in parentheses in the table give the maximum and minimum values of parameters. For linear changes, most are percentages, and for rotations, most are degrees. When there is a row of three numbers, the middle one indicates a default value which is not obvious.
| 2D Editor Advanced |
2D Editor CPU |
3D Editor CPU |
3D Editor GPU |
Studio PiP |
Position (±200)
|
Position (±400)
|
Position
- Position X (±400)
- Position Y (±200)
- Position Z (Zoom, ±400 but image disappears at -99 which is greatly enlarged)
|
Position
- Horizontal (±200)
- Vertical (±200)
- Z Position (Zoom, (±1000 but image disappears at -500 which is half-size)
|
Position (±100)
|
Size (linkable) (0 200)
|
Size (linkable, 0 400)
|
Size (linkable, 0 400)
|
Size (linkable, 0 200)
|
Size (not linkable, 0 200)
|
| |
|
Shear (±360)
- Shear X (skew)
- Shear Y (tilt)
- Shear Zx (mirror-like)
- Shear Zy (flip-like)
|
|
|
Rotation (±720) |
Rotation (±360)
- Flip Horizontal
- Flip Vertical
|
Mirror
- Flip Horizontal
- Flip Vertical
|
Rotation (±720)
- X (flip)
- Y (mirror)
- Z (spin)
|
|
Rotation
- Rotation X (±360, flip)
- Rotation Y(±360, mirror)
- Rotation Z (±360, spin)
- Pivot X (±400, changes axis)
- Pivot Y (±400, changes axis)
- Pivot Z (±400, moves axis ahead of and behind image plane
- Backside image
- Flip Horizontal
- Flip Vertical
- solid Color
|
Camera (perspective effects, like swings and tilts of a view camera, complicated interactions!)
- Rotation X (-360 360, look right/left)
- Rotation Y (-360 360, look up/down)
- Rotation Z (-360 360, spin)
- Pivot X (±400, moves vertical axis right-left)
- Pivot Y (±400, moves horizontal axis up/down)
- Pivot Z (±400, Moves axis of rotation ahead of or behind image plane
- Position X (±400 right-left)
- Position Y (±400, up is negative)
- Position Z (Zoom, -400 100 400 but image disappears at 0, which is greatly enlarged)
- Field of view (1 50.4 135 -- like 35mm camera lens focal lengths -- zoom)
|
Border
- Width (0 100)
- Color (any)
- Softness (0 100)
|
Inner Border
- Width (0 100)
- Height (0 100)
- Softness (0 100)
- Transparency (0 100)
- Color (any)
- Blend Type
- Color Gradient (to any)
- Direction (±180)
|
Inner Border
- Width (0 100)
- Height (0 100)
- Softness (0 100)
- Transparency (0 100)
- Color (any)
- Blend
|
Border
- Width (0 100)
- Color (any)
- Softness (0 100)
|
Border
- Width (0 100)
- Height (0 100)
- Color (any)
- Softness (0 100)
- Transparency (0 100)
|
Outer Border
- Width (0 100)
- Height (0 100)
- Round Style
- Softness (0 100)
- Transparency (0 100)
- Color (any)
- Blend Type
- Color Gradient (to any)
- Direction (±180)
|
Outer Border
- Width (0 100)
- Height (0 100)
- Round Style
- Softness (0 100)
- Transparency (0 100)
- Color (any)
Blend
|
Transparency
- Transparency (0 100)
- Edge softness (0 100)
|
Transparency
- Transparency (0 100)
- Edge softness (0 100)
|
Transparency
- Transparency (0 100)
- Edge softness (0 100)
|
Transparency
- Transparency (0 100)
- Edge softness (0 100)
|
Video
|
Shadow
- Offset (0 100)
- Direction (0 360)
- Transparency (0 100)
|
Shadow
- X Offset (±50)
- Y Offset (±50)
- Softness (0 100)
- Transparency (0 100)
|
Shadow
- X Offset (±50)
- Y Offset (±50)
- Softness (0 100)
- Transparency (0 100)
- Color (any)
|
Shadow
- Offset (0 100)
- Direction (0 360)
- Softness (0 100))
- Transparency (0 100)
|
Shadow
- Horizontal Offset (±50)
- Vertical Offset (±50)
- Color (any)
- Transparency (0 100)
- Softness (0 100)
|
Cropping (0 100)
- Left %
- Top %
- Right %
- Bottom %
|
Cropping (0 100)
|
Cropping (0 100)
|
Cropping (0 100)
- Left %
- Top %
- Right %
- Bottom %
|
Cropping (0 100)
- Top
- Bottom
- Left
- Right
- Corner Curve
|
| Corner Curve (0 100) |
Corner Curve (0 100) |
| |
Quality
- Custom quality (on/off)
- Quality level
- 2D Filter
- Box
- Triangle
- Hermite Cubic
- Quadratic B-Spline
- Fast cubic B-Spline
- Cubic B-spline
- Cubic Spline
- 3-lobed Lanczos
- 4-lobed Lanczos
- 5-lobed Lanczos
- 6-lobed Lanczos
- Gaussian
- Sinc 8x8
- Sinc 16x16
- Sinc 32x32
- Moms3
- 2D Precision
- 1 bit filter
- 2 bit filter
- 3 bit filter
- 4 bit filter
- 5 bit filter
- 6 bit filter
- Lowpass Filter
|
Quality
- Custom quality (on/off)
- Quality level
- 2D Filter
- Box
- Triangle
- Hermite Cubic
- Quadratic B-Spline
- Fast cubic B-Spline
- Cubic B-spline
- Cubic Spline
- 3-lobed Lanczos
- 4-lobed Lanczos
- 5-lobed Lanczos
- 6-lobed Lanczos
- Gaussian
- Sinc 8x8
- Sinc 16x16
- Sinc 32x32
- Moms3
- 2D Precision
- 1 bit filter
- 2 bit filter
- 3 bit filter
- 4 bit filter
- 5 bit filter
- 6 bit filter
- 3D Filter
- Anisotropic 0
- Anisotropic 1
|
|
|
