How to cut portions of the screen from a clip?

[Guest]

Hello! I am fairly new to editing using any program, with Premiere being one of my first. Right now, it is the only program that I have to use, and I've been quite fine with that for the time being. I am running into an issue. I record gameplay footage, to be posted on YouTube, and very recently I have started to record footage from a Nintendo 3DS. This is a device with two screens, but my raw, recorded footage comes with those two screens stacked on top of one another in one video, with the top screen being larger and the bottom screen being smaller.

For my final product, I would like for these two screens to be moved around separately, so I am looking for a way that I can literally cut the screen and take out each of those portions to move independently. The only tool I have come across that allows me to do so in Premiere is the crop tool, but that comes down to me having the same clip in my timeline twice, and this seems to be increasing my render time dramatically, even with them cropped properly (as if Premiere is still rendering the cropped-out portions of both videos.

Is there a better way that I can achieve this effect?

Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5

(The computer that is doing the editing/rendering is not hooked to the Internet - the sole purpose of it is editing and rendering.)

Message was edited by: Kaichu - Didn't mention what tool I was already using. Oops.

[Ann Bens · Accepted solution]

Crop tool is the tool to use.

And that is correct if you want two sections of a clip you need to add the clip twice.

[Guest]

But, is there a way to actually eliminate the 'data' that's been cropped out? It feels like that would speed up my rendering times immensely, without me having to drop any sort of quality.

As it is, Premiere seems to hold onto the rest of the video still, in case you want to expand the cropped area.

[christines19630959]

You can try using the Opacity option in the effect window and apply a Mask to it. I'm not sure if this will speed up your render at all. I believe both effects are probably "accelerated" by your graphics card. If I understand what you want to do correctly, you will still need to have multiple layers.

Do you have a discrete GPU and if so, do you have GPU Acceleration turned on? That will drastically improve your rendering speed for effects like that.

...one last thing you could do but I don't recommend is to cut out the video on one layer and then render it with a key signal. Then bring that back into your project. That would get rid of the information behind the rest of that video like you asked to do but it will take a longer time and I don't know if that will actually increase the speed of your final render by that much.

[Ann Bens]

He is using 5.5 and there are no masks.

Premiere only renders what is showing not what is underneath.

Kaichu: if you have a nvidia card make sure you have it hacked for gpu acceleration.