Video editing software that allows side-by-side frame editing

Question

I have a bunch of mpg files and I would like to compile them into one video where I play clips from the individual files side-by-side at certain points. Is there an editing software that allows me to do this? I would also like to overlay text and insert still images and sound.

Answer 1

The video editor built into Blender 3D modelling toolkit can do exactly this as can be seen in this instructional video.

It can also:

• Split screen and picture in picture videos
• "Green Screen" to substitute another video or still for a plain colored background.
• Video stabilization to remove or reduce shake
• Accept multiple video formats to produce a single video
• Multi-track both sound and video
• Insert still images as variable length shots in the video
• Edit, Mix and Overlay sounds
• Insert Captions that are any of Plain Text, Overlays, Animated Plain Text, Animated Overlays, 3D Text, Animated 3D Text (also as overlays), Subtitles, etc.
• Add transitions, fades & effects to video footage.
• You can even do things like the flying, spinning video frame .
• Of course the rest of Blender can be used 3D model, render and animate there is a surprise

This half hour tutorial on Blender Video editing is just one of the ones that I found that was well worth watching.

Blender is Cross Platform, Free - Gratis and Open Source and there is a lot of online tutorials, community support, etc. - Just in case I sound too much like an advert I had better say that I am an occasional user of Blender no more.

Answer 2

ffmpeg provides a light-weight way to do what you want. It's another cross-platform tool and is free. It is a command-line utility (i.e. no point-and-click user interface) but the method for creating side-by-side videos looks simple enough:

Compare two videos side by side using ffmpeg.

Adding text overlays and sound in ffmpeg is possible, but I'm sure you'll find it much more convenient to use ffmpeg just to produce the bare side-by-side sequences, and then use your favourite graphical video editor to insert these into your main video and add text overlays and audio.