Layer a clip over your main video on upper tracks

The main video track plays your story in order. Clips on the tracks above it play at the same time, in front of the main video. Where a layer clip is on screen, the highest track wins. That gives you b-roll, picture-in-picture, and split screens from one set of tools.

Put a clip on an upper track

Here are three ways to do it.

• Hover over a video or photo card in Media, open its More actions menu, and choose Add overlay. The clip lands at the playhead on the first upper track with room, or on a new track above the others.
• Drag a clip from the main track upward. While you drag, drop zones appear between the tracks. Release on a track to join it, or between two tracks to open a new one.
• Select a clip, open Track in the right panel, and use Move to the track above and Move to the track below. A clip leaving the main track closes the gap it leaves behind.

An upper track can have gaps between its clips. Clips on one track never overlap, so a clip that lands on an occupied spot slides to the next free space.

Size it in the frame

Select the layer clip and open Framing in the right panel. The Layout menu has six options:

• Full covers the whole frame.
• Top, Bottom, Left, and Right give the clip one half of the frame.
• PiP shrinks the clip into a small picture in the lower-right corner.

For fine adjustment, the same tab has Fit and Fill, a Zoom slider, Rotation buttons, Flip buttons, and an Opacity slider. Lowering the opacity lets the main video show through the layer. Give one layer the Left layout and another the Right layout and you have a split screen.

Set its timing

A layer clip is a bar on its track, like any other clip. Drag the bar to move it in time, and drag its edges to trim it. Edges snap to the playhead and to the edges of other items, so you can start a cutaway on the exact word you want.

Switch whole tracks on and off

At the left edge of the timeline, each track has small toggles:

• The eye shows Hide track or Show track.
• The speaker, on tracks that carry sound, shows Mute track or Unmute track.
• Audio rows have a speaker, and title rows have an eye.

One click turns the whole track off. The next click turns every segment back on, including any you had switched off one by one. To work on a single clip, open its Clip options menu and choose Mute clip to silence it or Disable clip to take it out of the picture without deleting it.

Plan the sound

A layer clip brings its own audio. When you lay cutaway footage over a spoken scene, mute the layer so the speaker keeps talking underneath, then use Hide track to compare the edit with and without the cutaway.

Start a project

Add a second clip to a project in DepCut, choose Add overlay from its More actions menu, and set its layout to PiP.