• Adobe After Effects

  Exporting in AE CS4 with TRANSPARENT background

  Posted by Amy Ruhl on August 6, 2009 at 10:17 pm

  Hello,
  Thank you in advance for reading my post:

  I’ve been keying footage out in AE using keylight and am now ready to export some of these files. However, when I’ve exported using the “render queue” the footage is coming out with a black background behind the keyed image, rather than a checkered transparency.

  Will someone please tell me what settings I need to adjust to export and retain transparency?

  Thanks!!!

  Todd Kopriva replied 16 years, 9 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Andy George

  August 6, 2009 at 10:41 pm

  Amy,
  You need to export your footage with an Alpha Channel.
  This is the information that tells your editing software
  whats “not there”

  Not all codecs can carry an alpha channel.
  A lot of image sequences can, as well as the lossless
  codec.

  Click on your output modual under the video output/Channels
  if you change this to RGB+Alpha that will enable it
  on supported codecs.

  One of your render Q presets should be “lossless with Alpha”
  and is a good one to go with.
  

  -Andy
• 

  Todd Kopriva

  August 6, 2009 at 11:23 pm

  Here’s a paragraph from “About alpha channels and mattes” that tells what formats can contain alpha channels:

  “Many file formats can include an alpha channel, including Adobe Photoshop, ElectricImage, FLV, F4V, TGA, TIFF, EPS, PDF, and Adobe Illustrator. AVI and QuickTime (saved at a bit depth of Millions Of Colors+), also can contain alpha channels, depending upon the codec (encoder) used to generate the images stored in these containers. For Adobe Illustrator EPS and PDF files, After Effects automatically converts empty areas to an alpha channel.”

  ———————————————————————————————————
  Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
  putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
  ———————————————————————————————————

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