Having trouble creating a split screen video

[Mark Moore]

In my "Transformers: Darkest Hour" fan edit, I've turned up the saturation. As a bonus feature, I'd like to do a before-and-after comparison video in a split-screen presentation: unsaturated on the left, saturated on the right, each side holding half the image.

I'm having trouble. I was doing this through the use of the Picture-in-Picture effect in Womble and project files within project files within project files. In other words, the "Left" project file consists of the left half of the unsaturated image on the left and a blank screen on the right, and the "Right" project file consists of the right half of the saturated image on the right and a blank screen on the left.

Here's the problem: Womble considers empty space to be black space, so, when I overlap the left image and right image to fill the screen, the blackness does one of two things (depending on which project file is in the Video area of the timeline and which is in the Title area): darken the saturated image to actually be darker than the unsaturated image or darken the unsaturated image to make it darker than on the original DVD set (which unfairly represents the original image and makes the saturation process look more drastic than it really is).

Any solution to this? Otherwise, I'll have to ditch this featurette.

 

[ThrowgnCpr]

Anytime Womble has to encode something you are creating a mess. Are each of your features already lined up in terms of frames and length? If so, render each project separately from Womble and combine in a split screen using virtualdub or avisynth. Womble is OK for simple snip and move cutting, but I strongly suggest avoiding the software for anything more complicated than that.