importing .mov

[Richard Powell]

You want to import it into a material, then apply that material to an object, be it a plane, cube, background object, whatever. Create a new material. You can choose which channel you want to import the movie into. Most of the time, you’re going to use Luminance. You’d choose the Color channel if you’re using it on a background object. You’d use the Alpha channel if you needed to matte out parts of the movie you’ve imported into another channel.

Let’s say you’re using Luminance, which is the case for 90% of needs. There’s a horizontal box in the luminance channel–click that, root around your drive for your movie, and load it in. You’ll be prompted to copy the movie to the directory where your c4d file is saved. If your movie isn’t too big, go ahead. If it IS too big, get out of cinema and put your QT into a newly created folder named ‘tex’ in the same folder where you’re saving your cinema project file. Except for more advanced uses, you want to have your movies in a ‘tex’ folder next to your cinema projects.

But wait, not done. You have to tell cinema to play all frames, so click on the horizontal box with the name of your movie on it, and there’ll be an Animation tab at the top. Click that, and hit ‘calculate’ and cinema will look at your movie, figure out the frame rate and duration, and use that going forward. Apply this material to whatever object you want.

There are exceptions all over the place for this–playing your movie starting at F90 in Cinema for example, not playing all frames of your movie, looping your movie, ping-ponging, being able to see your movie in the editor window, etc. There are a hundred threads on this on this forum, so for more than these basics, you should search the cow c4d forum on the terms ‘animated texture’ or ‘qt texture’ or ‘quicktime texture’ or any of the above with ‘material’ instead of ‘texture.’ Good luck -govinda