“Test” Lower 3rd I could download? (Alpha channel problems grrr…)

[Mike Kujbida]

Hannah, which DJ collection did it come from?
I’ve got a bunch here that I can try for you.
Can you post the problem clip somewhere like YouSendIt (100 MB. limit for the free version)?
Did you try contacting Digital Juice?
They’ve always been very quick to respond to any questions I’ve had.

[Hannah Jacobs]

Well, I found other Lower 3rds to download online to test, and they work fine in my Vegas project (Properties=>Alpha Channel=>Straight (Matted) and it works perfectly, so I guess the problem does lie in the original Lower 3rds.

They’re a couple years old, so I don’t know. The ones I downloaded had a gray background before applying the Alpha channel, the ones I’m having trouble with have a black background, but I don’t think that makes any difference.

Anyway, thanks for the offer to help, guess I’ll just find other Lower 3rds to buy to avoid whatever problem I’m having.

[Mike Kujbida]

Hannah, which ones are they?
Did you drop the mov file directly on the timeline or did you use the Juicer to render out a clip or an image sequence?

[Hannah Jacobs]

I just dropped the lower 3rd .mov files into the timeline and tried to set the Alpha channel.

The copyright on the DVD is 2003, so maybe something’s incompatible or something. I’ll contact them (bought from e1itevideo.com) tomorrow to see if they have a fix. Again, thanks for your help.

[Hannah Jacobs]

I’m getting no where, so if anyone is so inclined, here’s one of the lower 3rds to download and try, it’s a 46 megabyte zip file. I cannot get the Alpha channel to work:

https://tinyurl.com/qosxaw

If it works for anyone else, I sure would like to know how you did it. 🙂 Thanks in advance for the help.

I put it in the track, right-click right-click properties, then:
=>media => Alpha channel => Straight (unmatted)

I’ve also tried premultiplied, premultiplied dirty, and nothing works.
Thanks again for looking at the video, I’ve wasted hours.

[Mike Kujbida]

You’re not crazy as I couldn’t get it to work either 🙁
It’s time to move on to a different way of doing it and that is, believe it or not, the Chroma Keyer FX.
Drop the clip on the timeline and place another clip under it.
Click the Event FX icon on the lower third and select CHrom Blur and Chroma Keyer (in that order).
Disable the Chroma Blur filter for now and click the Chroma Keyer filter.
CLick the color picker and drag a samll bos in the black area of the clip in the Preview WIndow (set this to Best/Full).
The black should disappear, showing you the lower track.
Play with the high & low threshold and blur settings until it looks good to you (i.e. reduce the jaggies on the edges).
Now enable the Chroma Blur filter and play with the various Blur settings to further reduce the jaggies.
Good luck with it.

[Hannah Jacobs]

Thanks so much for checking that clip for me.

Your instructions on how to use Chroma to remove the black background worked perfectly. I’m new to Chroma and didn’t realize it could be applied to anything other than green/blue (seems so obvious now)

As I put in the subject line, I removed the zip file I linked to in my previous post, but this forum doesn’t allow me to remove the link unfortunately, so I hope too many people don’t waste time clicking that download link now that my problem is fixed.

Thanks again for your help, it’s greatly appreciated. 🙂