Creating the "Adaptation" twins duplicate look

Shawn Murphy

Shawn Murphy

Well-known member
How can you combine two clips of the same actor in the same exact framing so it appears that they are twins talking to each other? I tried cropping the two clips, but to no avail, and I know I've seen footage here where other people did this technique (not sure if it was done in Vegas). Thx!
 
Easiest way is to lock down the camera, shoot the actor on one side of the room, shoot him on the other side, and then do the crop. It'll work, even if it's not sophisticated.

Can you post your attempt?

Doing things more complicated than that will take some compositing.
 
I did that: locked the camera down, shot both takes, so I must be doing something wrong in the crop because I get half the frame as black..

ok, I figured it out, in the crop settings, under 'source', I need to change the 'Stretch to fill frame' to 'NO'

Thanks David, that's the kick in the pants I needed! Now I can make good on the promise to my daughters to film a skit with them arguing with their twins!
 
I played around with this a while back using After Effects. I just did another one with Apple's Shake. Here are a few clips on my website that I did some time ago using After Effects. Look for the clips titled: Eat Smoke, Car Hit, and Bat Hit.

http://snodart.com/clips.php

David pretty much summed up the important: a locked down camera (settings too). I did some where the action from clip A over-lapped the action in clip B. Had to rotoscope it when this happened. Took a looooon time... frame by frame. This is the case with the Bat Hit and Car Hit clips.

As long as the action doesn't overlap, look for areas in the background to cut along such as a door frame, corner, tree truck, etc. This will help hide the cut. Not sure if Vegas can do it, but After Effects and Shake allow you to feather the edges so that they blend together nicely.

It is possible to have the camera move in one of these shots (i.e., dolly or pan). You just have to mimic the camera movement each time so that the clips pretty much match. With AE, you can zoom in on the clips just a touch and then keyframe them so the the movement matches exactly.

Also look at this site. Lots of it there. He used AE as well.

http://ryanw.michaelfrisk.com/ryan-w/cloning.html


EDIT: I just realized this was post in "Vegas" oops.
 
I actually have about 10 of these shots at the end of my sci fi. I did it pretty similar to how David described, locked my camera down and shot both takes. From that point I brought the footage into Vegas and then edited how I wanted. What I did differently though was make a Beizer mask around one person, and since it was locked down, all the other characters fit perfectly within the frame. It was really simple, just Beizer a circle around one actor.

I've even done this with a lot of motion (pacing) in the frame by just key framing my mask. It works great and is the easiest way to do it. The other option is to just do an overlay with transparency. This doesn't work great because everything sort of bleeds out, but it can be usefull for an effect if you're interested in that.

Hope this helps a bit.
 
I've never used the cookie cutter in a project, just played with it briefly... Thanks David, I finally will have a use for that :)
 
This clip, about 20 seconds into it, the guys circling each other, and then then afterwards with the computer monitors, is the same effect (same actor) done with a greenscreen technique. If anyone's interested in seeing the whole short those couple of clips were taken from, it's here. There are a few other shots like this in there.
 
My One Man Attempt

My One Man Attempt

Well, here it is. My One man attempt at Twins.

Shot by me.
Edited by me.
Narration by me.

All the pans and camera movments were done in Vegas after the video was already shot locked down.

I used Cookie Cutter to "Clone" myself using two video clips.
I recorded and altered the narration in Goldwave Audio editor.
the music was an MP3 dropped into the time line.

Enjoy.

http://www.chopperbobmemorial.com/index3.html
 
snodart said:
I played around with this a while back using After Effects. I just did another one with Apple's Shake. Here are a few clips on my website that I did some time ago using After Effects. Look for the clips titled: Eat Smoke, Car Hit, and Bat Hit.

http://snodart.com/clips.php

David pretty much summed up the important: a locked down camera (settings too). I did some where the action from clip A over-lapped the action in clip B. Had to rotoscope it when this happened. Took a looooon time... frame by frame. This is the case with the Bat Hit and Car Hit clips.

As long as the action doesn't overlap, look for areas in the background to cut along such as a door frame, corner, tree truck, etc. This will help hide the cut. Not sure if Vegas can do it, but After Effects and Shake allow you to feather the edges so that they blend together nicely.

It is possible to have the camera move in one of these shots (i.e., dolly or pan). You just have to mimic the camera movement each time so that the clips pretty much match. With AE, you can zoom in on the clips just a touch and then keyframe them so the the movement matches exactly.

Also look at this site. Lots of it there. He used AE as well.

http://ryanw.michaelfrisk.com/ryan-w/cloning.html


EDIT: I just realized this was post in "Vegas" oops.
Click to expand...


how about moving objects like playing catch by yourself? passing a basketball to yourself?
 
CacheMoneyVideo said:
how about moving objects like playing catch by yourself? passing a basketball to yourself?
Click to expand...

Not too sure about these. Probably not with the method I described, but there is probably a way.
 
Jeremy Ordan said:
I actually have about 10 of these shots at the end of my sci fi. I did it pretty similar to how David described, locked my camera down and shot both takes. From that point I brought the footage into Vegas and then edited how I wanted. What I did differently though was make a Beizer mask around one person, and since it was locked down, all the other characters fit perfectly within the frame. It was really simple, just Beizer a circle around one actor.

I've even done this with a lot of motion (pacing) in the frame by just key framing my mask. It works great and is the easiest way to do it. The other option is to just do an overlay with transparency. This doesn't work great because everything sort of bleeds out, but it can be usefull for an effect if you're interested in that.

Hope this helps a bit.
Click to expand...

I've done this multiple times, even on shots with a pan in them (two of me entering a room from different sides, one comes in, pan, then the other). But my problem is that when I use a bezier mask to cut out something and place it in another shot with the same framing, I get a black visible line around the mask I used. Will this go away after the render?
 
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