Warning :

This tutorial requires the presence of a second video track in Studio, only those with at least a "Plus" version of Studio can implement this tutorial. "Plus" versions have been introduced with Studio 9.

Step 1

Open Studio and import your two clips to the timeline. The primary video on the main video track and the video that will not be selected will be on the overlay track.

It looks like this:

Step 2

Let's delete the audio track of the second video. For this, we lock the overlay video track :

and we delete the audio track :

Keep the overlay video track locked !!!! (very important)

Step 3

Open the video toolbox :

Step 4

Select the first clip (main track) and activate the Picture-In-Picture (PIP) tool :

Step 5

In the menu Presets, select Full screen :

This is the whole trick. If the overlay track is still locked, then the image from the main video track will appear in the viewer for the PIP tab. Otherwise we will get a black screen.

It works very well if you have "two monitors". The left one for the main video track and the right one for the overlay track :

By moving the timeline scrubber the two videos are displayed simultaneously :

Step 6

Here, I would almost be disappointed if none of you posted a comment like :"Ok, but initially the two videos are not synchronized on the timeline !". Indeed, there is no chance that this will be the case. If I did not mention it at the outset, it is necessary that in order to synchronize the videos you must first understand how the trick works and thus have first read steps 1 to 5.

There is no miracle solution. You must identify in each of the images, a visual element specific enough to, by trimming and shifting the overlay video with a one-frame accuracy if necessary, synchronize the two clips. It is a long and tedious process if you want it to be perfect.

You can also do this by matching the waveform of the sound tracks, but it is much less accurate.

You can take as a reference the flash of a camera or clapping hands. If you have an actual movie clap board or if you can make your own, it can be a very funny sequence in addition to helping you achieve synchronization.

About the clapboard, did you know that the famous clap start of a sequence was used primarily to synchronize the audio and video tracks that were not registered by the same device ? Nowadays, filmmakers continue to use it only because it includes the following infos : scene number, shot number and take number plus other technical info.

Step 7

By alternately locking/unlocking the overlay track or main video + audio tracks we are able to split the videos where we want and delete the overlay track parts we don't want to keep :

There is actually a variant if you want the overlay track to be released in order to re-use it for something else. In fact, during splitting, you must cut the main video + audio tracks too. So you can get parts from the overlay track you want to keep and place them on the main video track.

You get this in the case of my example :

{Thanks to Loosecannon for the fine tuning}