[Dave Fleming]

Hey John,

My bad for not posting a solution back to the COW…believe it or not, I actually got steered in the right direction on an Avid.com forum!

For me, it was all about the version matrix. I had been having display issues with my second monitor a few days prior to the problem I posted, and my IT guy “solved” the problem by upgrading to the latest nVidia drivers. That upgrade screwed me for capturing from tape, although everything else on the Avid worked perfectly! The people on the Avid.com forum were also asking me to check my QT version and make sure it lined up with your Avid version.

So, start there…were there any QT or video driver updates recently?

Dave

[Dave Fleming]

Thanks for the suggestions, guys…As it turns out, the largest problem (no pun) was the fact that my high res .psd file was simply to big and that was causing a good bit of the blockiness. When I reduced the file size by about half in Photoshop (I still had enough resolution to play with), the problem cleared up quite a bit.

Dave

[Dave Fleming]

Thanks for all the advice, guys. Yeah Ian, if I had it to do over again, I would probably actually project the image onto the guy and capture the whole thing live. But, at the time, there were too many inherent timing problems to capture it live. Plus, I would also have the added headache of getting slides made (remember, it should look like a slide projector, not a video projector).

I didn’t care so much about the displacement of the image on his body, as I just blurred it very slightly. The soft light xfer mode gave me some desired results, but even with opacity on this layer set to 10%-20%, I was getting to many unwanted problems with how it interacted with the keyed layer. I tried adding an alpha matte in addition to the soft light, but it just got stranger…