Learn Digital Video Editing

It occurred to me that some people are ending up here after searching for split screens in Adobe Premiere, but don’t want an actual split screen effect. If you’re looking for a way to have two different clips playing simultaneously, today you’re in luck.

If there is a technical term for this type of effect, someone please let me know!

1. Start by importing your clips into the project and adding them both to the timeline. Position them on top of each other, and if you want, trim them to be the same size (you could always trim it later if you want to leave it for now).

2. In order to fit two clips on the screen, we’re going to have to crop some of the video, meaning a portion of each clip won’t be visible. Choose the Crop Effect and drag it onto the top clip to apply it.

3. With the top clip selected, go up to the effect controls. Twirl down the options for the Crop Effect by clicking on the little triangle to the left of it. Here you have the option to crop the top, left, right, or bottom of the clip. Whether you crop left/right or top/bottom will be depend on which type of split you want. Crop left/right for a vertical split, and top/bottom for a horizontal split. In this example I’m making a vertical split.

I’ve already applied a 50% left crop to the clip. As you can see, the screen is now split in two. If I play it back, both clips play at the same time. The problem, however, is that the action in both clips is getting cut off. Obviously we want both clips to play at the same time, but we want to see all the action as well. For this we’ll have to do some tweaking.

4. When you crop your clip, you want the total crop to be 50% so that the video will fill half the screen. For this particular clip it works out that by cropping 25% left and 25% right I end up with a clip half the size of the screen and still manage to keep most of the important video content visible. After applying that cropping though, the clip is sitting in the middle of the screen instead of to one side. The solution is to go to the Motion Effect and change the clip’s position. With the Motion Effect selected you can click and drag the clip over to the side where you want it.

5. Select the bottom clip and repeat the cropping process, only this time be sure to position the clip on the other side of the screen.

That’s all there is to it. If you have any troubles, please ask questions either via email or in the comments section.