QuickTime Pro: How to Make Picture-in-Picture

This document describes how to create the picture-in-picture effect in QuickTime Player with QuickTime Pro.

You must have QuickTime Pro to work with movie tracks. To learn how to upgrade, see the QuickTime website.

Use the Movie Properties of QuickTime Player to inspect and change many video track properties, such as movie size and graphics mode. A basic compositing trick is to add a small picture-in-picture video to the corner of your movie. This requires two video tracks.

  1. Open Movie 1, the one in which you will insert the smaller picture-in-picture video.
  2. Import picture-in-picture movie:
    • If the picture-in-picture video is in a separate movie (Movie 2), open Movie 2, select the frames that will become the picture in picture, and copy them.
    • If the picture-in-picture video is in Movie 1, extract the video track. This will create a new movie with that video as the sole media track. Select the frames that will become the picture in picture, and copy them.
  3. In Movie 1, select the frames where you want the picture-in-picture to appear.
  4. Choose Add Scaled from the Edit menu to paste the picture-in-picture video onto the selected area of Movie 1. This adds a second video track to Movie 1.
  5. To make the picture-in-picture video track smaller while keeping the same aspect ratio, choose Show Movie Properties from the Window menu, select Video Track 2, and modify the Size property from the right-hand Properties pop-up. Choose Select All, then Shift-drag one of the red corner handles


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Published Date: Feb 20, 2012