Merging Google Zoom Speaker Views

Is there a way to concatenate Speaker Views from a Zoom recording without voids above and below the centered frames?
I recently performed in a play (one word away from a cameo) via Google Zoom similar to @Y.S post Video of a string ensemble performing remotely. We actors performed from our own home via a Zoom meeting. Unlike Y.S.'s video, the director edited the recording to simulate the individual actors being on the same stage by reducing each actor’s speaker view to place them side by side in the editor (due to copyright restrictions, I cannot share a screen shot). This resulted in large, black voids above and below the centered, concatenated views. I found that annoying in the community theatre’s published broadcast.
I suspect ShotCut’s Size, Position & Rotate filter is the tool to start with, but wonder about image quality. Any suggestions?
Shotcut version 21.02.27
Microsoft Windows 10 Home 10.0.19042 Build 19042
Dell Inc. laptop Inspiron 15-3567 64-based PC
Intel® Core™ i3-7130U CPU @ 2.70GHz, 2700 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)

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Size, Position & Rotate filter is becoming my favorite filter, however, it is a love-hate relationship :joy: as it is a voracious cpu-hog.

My machine is a four-core, max 3.2 gHz, and SPR Exports are horrendously slow. It is the nature of the mathematics involved. It has gotten a little better since I upgraded from 6 GB to 20 GB of memory.
I suspect it with be painfully slow on your laptop.

For what you propose to do, I suspect you will need to stack an SPR filter and a Crop: Rectangle filter on each track.

I guess this should be possible using “Size, Position and Rotate”, but, to be honest, it is hard to say without seeing a sample of the footage.

I should say that our videos that you’ve mentioned have nothing to do with Zoom. :slight_smile: The tracks were recorded separately (by musicians themselves, using their smartphones in usual video recording mode), and then the sound was mixed and the video was edited.

The purpose of this method was to achieve true stereo mix of the best quality possible in such conditions.

It is a bit confusing that the currently most popular video-conferencing service, and the most popular portable digital audio recording device have the same name - “Zoom” - although they have absolutely no connection between them.

This confusion is compounded by the popular usage of the word “Zoom” to mean any video-conferencing, as in “Let’s do a Zoom session tomorrow; do you want to do it on Skype or on FaceTime?”

Not to be confused with “Xoom”, pronounced the same way, for sending money…

Indeed, some naming collision here… But this probably cannot be undone, so we just have to get used to it. :slight_smile:

By the way, then I feel the need to clarify that while I actually use Zoom recorders in my practice, the tracks for the videos mentioned were really recorded on smartphones and locally by musicians on their self-isolation, without using any Zoom’s - be it video conferencing software or audio recording hardware. Just to be precise. :slight_smile: But other recordings on the VivaMuse’s channel were done using Zoom hardware recorders. :slight_smile:

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