Splits screens with the Video Collage tool

- [Instructor] The multi screen or split screen effect, that's having several videos on your screen at the same time. It's a very cool video effect, but it can be a rather difficult effect to create. Fortunately, Adobe has added a very intuitive tool to Premier Elements that makes creating this effect much simpler. To access the video collage tool, we go over to the create button in the upper right hand corner and select video collage. As you can see on the right there are numbered templates for creating your collage. Some accommodating as few as three videos at once, all the way down to some accommodating as many as seven videos at once.

I'm going to select the second template. Just double click on it. And then I need to gather my assets, my video clips. So I'll go to the media bin in the upper left corner, select files and folders, and then let's just grab a couple of videos. So I'll grab this bicycle video, hold down the command or shift key, going to grab a kayaking video, and then let's go down and grab one of the walking videos. Now your videos do need to be at least five seconds long in order for the tool to work so make sure you're selecting longer videos.

Click on open and those three different videos will be added to our asset bin and now we can simply drag them into the template. So I'm going to grab kayak. I'll drag that into the upper left. I'll drag walking into the lower left. And then the bicycling over here on the right. Now as you see, there's a little hand tool that appears as you hover over each one of the clips or as you select each one of the clips in the placeholders so you can adjust the position of the clip in the video frame. You can also zoom in and out of the clip by using this little slider.

If you want to get rid of your clip, you can click on the trash can and replace it with a different clip. We can also switch these clips around if, for some reason, I want kayaking to be on the bottom and walking to be on the top. I select the kayaking clip, go over here to the switch tool, click on that, than I drag the clip into the grid where I'd like it to appear and it swaps the two out. You also have the option of muting the clip, which I usually select because there's going to be musical backgrounds so I usually mute each one of my clips.

And for longer clips, I sometimes trim them. You can see how long each clip runs, it's indicated right here on the clip itself. Six seconds, ten seconds, 11 seconds. And you can select the trim media option when a clip is selected and that will open up a little trimmer where you can set the in and out points to control how long your clip is. And I do want to show you why that's important, not just so you can select the best part of a segment, but because you have a number of options.

Now over here on the right are options for, not just the templates, but the playback settings. And you can set your template either to play one clip then another clip then another clip or have them all playing continuously. If you select the option to have them all playing continuously, you kind of have to trim them so that they're all the same length. Otherwise they'll play and the shortest one will go to freeze frame. That's probably not what you want so if you're going to have them play all together, you'll probably want to select each one, go to the trimmer, and set the end point so that the duration, which is indicated right down here in the lower right, is the same for all of the clips.

Then, finally, you can add music. You can select from scores and scores we'll talk about later in the course are musical clips that are provided with the program and which can be customized to play at any specific length. So I'm going to select one, you may not be able to hear it, and just apply it. The clip is generated and conformed to the length of our video, then I can click preview to see how it all looks. You'll see there's a little transition.

(score music playing) Very nice and you can see because one clip was shorter than the others, it froze while it waited for the other clips to finish. So it's a pretty cool tool. It makes creating a very complicated effect relatively simple and intuitive. When you're ready to output your video collage, you can either export it directly to your timeline by clicking the button in the upper right or select export & share in which case you'd have the option of saving it as a video file or sending it online to YouTube, Facebook, and video directly from the program.