Rendering/exporting with alpha channel background – how to

[James Macon]

Hi Renton-
What your trying to accomplish isn’t entirely possible by the workflow you described.

You might try applying Boris RED directly to your media within Vegas and then using Vector Text to add your title over your clip. Hit Apply once you’re done and you should be all set. Hope this helps!

[James Macon]

Renton-
Upon further investigation we were able to find an export setup for RED that does respect text over an alpha layer.

Export a Movie file using the AVI Direct Show movie type at the uncompressed 32bit compression setting. Make sure you have your alpha set to Straight Alpha, that you have no fields, and hit export.

The standalone file will have a black background and upon import it will be the same. If you right click on the clip and select properties, under the media tab of the subsequent window you will see an alpha option, change that to straight and you you should be good to go!

My apologies for the confusion and jumping the gun in my original answer.

-James

[Renton Maclachlan]

Thanks so much James. I now have both the ability to cut and paste (as per editing on my other post) and also get transparency.

I could not export as uncompressed 32 bit as you suggested as that was not an option…I’m on a 64 bit machine using the 64 bit RED, so I suppose that is why. I exported as ‘Full frames (uncompressed).

After importing into Vegas, and right clicking on the clip in the Project Media window, then selecting the ‘straight alpha’ option under the media tab as you suggested, the clip came onto my time line with transparency! Great. I have a lot of this to do!!!

Thanks so much for the help. It is really very much appreciated. It is not that intuitive however. 🙁 Pity.

Sometimes when I start RED from within Vegas, Vegas crashes…

[James Macon]

Hi Renton-
Sorry to hear that the program isn’t meeting your expectations. Check out the tutorials here, they might be of some help!
As for the crash you’re seeing, if you contact support directly one of us will happily get back to you privately to work out why it’s happening and what can be done about it.

[Renton Maclachlan]

Hi James

The program does meet expectations…it is clearly very powerful…but I’m not using it all the time and one forgets how to do things..leading to frustrations. I worked out how to produce a typewriter effect typing on text last year but when I came to use that effect the other day, I had forgotten how to do it. I’ve rediscovered the procedure but it took me a while…have to write it down! Doing the type on effect was as simple as in RED (once you know/remember how to do it), compared with other suggestions people have offered to get the same result.

But in terms of this tranparency thing, the solution was not obvious…I very much doubt I could have found it. I looked through the various settings in RED and still don’t know if what I did was necessary or correct. I’ve got the checker board up as a background but can’t even remember how I got that…but at least it told me I had transparency…I think! I will experiment with trying to get the typewriter effect through vegas, but I can do it through the stand alone version ok now. Just need to work out all the suitable parameters.

I’ve looked through a variety of tutorials and have found them helpful, especially the one on chromakeying. Interestingly, for the project I’m doing (four angles all chromakeyed), I’ve use RED but one of the angles I found very hard to get right, so flipped over the the Vegas CK and it did the keying perfect, straight off…yet it wouldn’t on the other angles!!

Thanks again for the help. Much appreciated.

Renton