Retaining quality in export?

[Philip Knight]

An old posting, but I figure
I’d leave a response anyway…

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Not knowing if you use a PC or Mac, or the format, codec or compression level you original BK footage was, hard to give you an instant answer.

But here may is perhaps the best way to do it as others do also:

— I use a PC and my NLE is Sony Vegas Pro — I very rarely export both BK and emitter work together because I want the BK original footage to be in its best original form (as it is in my NLE). So I hide the BK and export only the emitters layer/s as a PNG image sequence with alpha. This preserves the quality of the emitters since PNG format is lossless.

— Then I put the emitters on a track above the original footage in my NLE. This gives me additional tweaking and improvement parameters due to all the fx, color, etc. effects in the NLE. I usually always find a way to improve the appearance of emitters. Once in a while, I’ll even double emitter tracks at different transparency levels which gives even more control over appearance.

Win-win: Original footage preserved, emitters appearance can be fine-tuned a bit more.

[Paul Wright]

I am having a problem trying to render a PNG sequence much in the manner you described. This is how I want to do it for exactly the reasons you mentioned (ability to tweak individual emitters, etc, after re-importing to the NLE). However, my alpha PNGs come back very ‘dirty’ looking in Sony Vegas. The edges are darker and blotchy. Doesn’t seem as transparent. How do I get it to retain it’s original clarity over the footage? If I render from PI and leave the background intact, the final looks great. If I hide the background, and try to do a PNG with alpha, it doesn’t look right when I re-insert over the same footage in Vegas. What am I missing? Any ideas?

Thanks–PW