Video editing/software technique for static shot composed of two or more cropped scenes I'm trying to create a continuous, static shot video which in theory will contain myself in multiple positions around the set. I want it to be seamless - I figured this wouldn't be hard as I could cordon myself off to a limited space in the separate takes of the video and then somehow crop the video, like you would with an image, and blend the videos into each other with light correction if necessary, or use artificial light.
Problem is that I don't know the name of the technique or how to phrase this for research. I tried looking up 'splicing' and 'cropping' but that refers me to cutting up whole shots and sequencing them. I want one video that will be 3-4 separate videos of the same shot (not moving the camera at all between all 4 takes) cropped/'made transparent' at specific parts to make it seem like I cloned myself, basically. Another way to think about it is perhaps creating a 'green screen' in post production and drawing in a fixed area into the video which will become transparent, and then layering the 2nd shot behind it and repeating the process for the other 2 shots.
Pointers to documentation and advice on free software that can do this sort of thing would be much appreciated :)
Compositing is the broad term for what you want to do. Making part of the shot transparent is called creating a matte.
Not quite sure what you mean about creating a green screen in post production. A green screen is something that you have in the shot that you remove using chroma keying in post, where you make anything that is a particular shade of green (or blue, or any other colour, but most often green for video) transparent.
Free (FOSS) software that does this includes KDEnlive, Natron, Blender and ffmpeg.