Here’s a video I made with my dad singing to my mom and playing his baritone ukulele. Watch the video, then we’ll talk about how we made it.

We set up two cameras. Even though I have told you the on-camera mic isn’t good enough for sound with videos, I didn’t have my MiniDisc recorder with me. So we went with the best sound from the two cameras. Before he started playing, I started both cameras rolling and had  him clap his hands in frame.

When I imported both video clips into Kdenlive, I put them in two different video tracks. I discarded the audio from the track that I didn’t want, and I placed it above the track in which I was keeping the sound. Then I found the frame from that clip where my dad’s hands came together, and I lined it up with the spike in the waveform from the other clip’s sound so the audio and video were synced up in both clips.

Whichever clip is highest on the stack of video clips is the video that will be shown when you render. It’s similar the layers in Gimp. To switch back and forth between the two camera angles, I simply used the razor tool to slice up the top video clip and deleted the portions I did not want. I left the bottom video clip (with the sound) intact.

I didn’t like the harsh cuts between camera angles, so I put Dissolve transitions on the ends of the top video clip, giving the smooth cuts back and forth, and the sound stays nice and constant through the whole thing. Finally, I added a Fade from black/Fade to black video effect and a Fade in/Fade out audio effect to the bottom video clip. Click on the screenshots below to see them full size:

The dissolve transition between the two video clips

The finished project of "When You're Smiling"