Guide · OtterStudio

Put a reaction cam in the corner of a video

You have the thing you were watching and a recording of yourself watching it. You want one video with the second one small in the corner. That is two clips on two tracks, one resized and moved, and it takes about a minute.

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The two files

Add the main video first. The first video you add sets the size and frame rate of the whole project, so if the main footage is 1080p at 30 frames a second, that is what you will export. Then add the reaction recording. Each lands on its own video track, both starting at zero, and each brings its sound along on an audio track of its own.

Tracks are drawn top to bottom the way they are stacked: the lane at the top is on top of the picture. The second video you added is above the first, which is what you want here.

Make it small and put it in a corner

Click the reaction clip on the timeline. On the picture, it gets handles at its corners. Drag one inwards until it is the size you want; the shape stays locked to the original so nobody ends up squashed. Then drag the middle of it to a corner. It snaps to the edges and the centre lines as you get close.

Or do it from the card on the right. Under Position there are five buttons laid out like the picture: the four corners and the middle. Press bottom left and the clip goes there with a little margin. Under Size, Locked keeps the shape, and the Scale slider sets how big. A quarter of the width is the usual reaction-cam size.

If the reaction was recorded on a phone and is portrait, the box is tall. Leave it tall, or under Fit choose Cover and drag the box into a landscape shape: the picture fills the box and the top and bottom are cropped off. Corner rounding softens the box's corners, and all the way up makes it a circle, which suits a face.

Line them up in time

The two recordings almost never start at the same moment. Play them together and listen for something that happens in both, a laugh or a door. Then drag the reaction clip left or right along its track until they match. Zoom in with the slider above the timeline if you need to nudge by a frame. The sound moves with the picture, since they came from the same file.

If the reaction runs longer than the main video, select it and pull its right handle back so it ends when the main one does.

Sort out the sound

Two soundtracks are now playing at once. Each audio track has a fader at the left end of its lane, and a mute button. Usually the main video comes down to a third or so and the reaction stays at full, so your voice sits on top. If the reaction recording is hissy, select its audio clip and press Remove noise; there is a separate guide on what that does.

Export

Press Export MP4, keep the size the dialog suggests, and press Start export. Both layers and both soundtracks are rendered into one file. Everything you saw in the preview is what you get; the export draws from the same picture.

Other things people put in the corner

The same steps work for a logo (drop a PNG; transparency is kept), a title, a second camera angle, a screen recording with a webcam over it, or a phone recording of a concert over a photo. Bring forward and send back, under Stacking in the card, change which clip is on top when you have three or more.