Export w/ Transparent Background

[Jacob Wessler]

Mike,

Work on your composition as required. Key your footage, etc. Add the composition to the render que. Under the Output Module, select your format (Quicktime movie works well) and make sure you select RGB+ALPHA. This will output an alpha channel with your movie and you will have transparency in the file.

Good luck,
Jacob

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

After you’ve keyed the footage (using keylight, for example) just render your footage to a codec that supports an alpha channel (such as “Animation”)

In your render settings, you will have to make sure it is set to Millions of Colors+ The “+” indicates it will add the alpha channel.

If your client is editing on an Avid, you should render using the “straight” option rather than “pre-multiplied” Actually straight will work for most uses, but the quicktime file will look really ugly if it is played on the desktop. It will look okay in the Avid. Aharon Rabinowitz has a good tutorial on this issue.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/straight_vs_premult.php

If you need to provide the footage on tape, you will need to render out the main footage and then an alpha only version that you can then record to tape. The editor will have to marry the footage with the alpha down the line, so you might want to add a sync mark at the head of the footage and the alpha. (This is a pretty unlikely scenario so I wouldn’t plan on it… I just add it to help confuse the issue.)

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Ian Corey]

Depending on the performance of your machine (or, gulp, the client’s) your HD animation files might play back with a lot of chop in them. There’s a lot of data in Animation. I know my Mac Pro starts to stall about 10 seconds into a native res animation file.
If the client is a video professional- no worries.

[Ian Corey]

That would be this tut:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/junk_mattes/video-tutorial.php

[Paolo Ciccone]

You can use the SheerVideo codec which supports SD/HD material with an alpha channel. See https://www.bitjazz.com

—
Paolo Ciccone https://www.paolociccone.com
Hellriser Digital
Santa Cruz, CA