For my cooking show assignment, I first shot a series of videos and photos as I cooked supper. Conveniently enough. my camera also shoots video, so I put it on a tripod to get POV shots as I did the prep work. I threaded one arm between the legs of the tripod to get good and close. (It’s kind of distracting to chop when there’s a video screen showing your hands chopping right at the edge of your peripheral vision. Be careful!)

The one part that took a little bit of work was the shot where I did a dissolve between two shots of the clock on the stove to passing time. I didn’t have the camera on the tripod at that point, so the two pictures weren’t scaled or aligned to each other. Luckily, I took the still shots at a much higher resolution than the video, so I had room to play. I opened both pictures in GIMP and them copied and pasted one as a layer over the other. I set the top layer to 50% opacity to play with scaling and alignment:

I started with the images offset a little bit so I could get the scale right. Once I did that, then I just slid them until the lined up.

Once I scaled and aligned the layers, then I set the rectangle select tool to a fixed 16:9 ratio, selected the clock, and cropped to the selection. After I cropped, I scaled the image to 1280×720 to match the resolution of the video.

I edited the clips and stills together using OpenShot, my favorite video editor for Linux. On an earlier howto video I did, I narrated the soundtrack, but on this one, I decided to use titles to narrate and have an instrumental soundtrack. I used the Tracks to Sync blog at the Free Music Archive to find CC-licensed tunes.

I had a little trouble using Inkscape to edit the titles–whenever I edited the titles within OpenShot, I ended up with solid black text boxes, so the titles were unreadable. I settled for creating the titles in Inkscape and exporting as 1280×720 PNG files with transparent backgrounds. I then overlaid the title images onto the video in OpenShot.  To get the video and audio to align, I did speed up the video a little bit (which also had the salutory effect of making the video shorter).