Layers of Difficulty

So my DVD boxset of The Space Museum/The Chase turned up yesterday which meant I could delete the .mpg version of the VHS edition from my hard drive.  Going into the folder I found a copy of an old UK Gold trailer

As a little exercise of video editing I thought I’d update the trail to the DVD-quality visuals and that it would be very simple indeed.  And then I became aware of the limitations of Pinnacle Studio.  I’ve known for a long time that I need something a bit more professional and this has really put the tin lid on that.  The trailer, though simple, has one slight drawback.  The UK Gold logo overhangs the edge of the clip.

The logical thing to do is to Chromakey in the footage of the new sequence into the red windowed area, but then we have a problem with the green area, which has a moving clock.  Pinnacle Studio can deal well with Chromakey, but it wouldn’t overlay the new video into the red area without obliterating the edge of the UK Gold logo or vice versa.  It allows for transparency but this just means you’d have a section of the logo which was slightly odd-looking, a different colour.

I tried creating my own mattes:

 

but this just left me with a non-moving clock.  I tried the same in reverse with the clock

 

but again, the same problem with the video box.  In the end I managed to make them separately and overlay a corner of the screen (the clock + corner of the background) onto a video of the Red Box area + background and this proved seamless, but frustratingly difficult to do with the awkward interface of Pinnacle. 

So now I need to find a piece of software which can overlay multiple layers, eg:

+

Funny how something which seemed so simple can prove not to be.

You can view the finished version here: