[Jason Harbaugh]

When it works, it works great, but I’ve found it to be very unstable causing lockups or no realtime display. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it more stable. I would love to use it as a live keyer for the improv group I’m in.

And I’m just talking about using a ‘live’ input being keyed and then fullscreen display enabled. The program itself is fantastic and I’ll never key in Vegas again.

[Jason Harbaugh]

Love the design.

A bug I noticed right away, no matter what the resolution the site creates some horizontal scrolling.

[Jason Harbaugh]

Sounds like they are wanting mpeg1 not mpeg2. Still an odd request since wmv can get you a much better picture at a lower bitrate and filesize.

If you still have problems with filesize you may need to go to a smaller image size as others have suggested. Render it out at 320×240.

I would contact them again and see exactly what they want or don’t want. I’ve been in similar situations where it seems like they have the least technical person giving out the technical requests and they end up asking for the wrong thing, or confusing terminology.

[Jason Harbaugh]

Thanks for that tutorial link. I never heard of using a frame server before. That is a great shortcut for bringing in short clips to do a quick match in PI. Fun stuff!

[Jason Harbaugh]

Look forward to hearing what is new.

[Jason Harbaugh]

Thanks! I qualify for two.

[Jason Harbaugh]

Ok I’ll give it a shot. We use two editors here, Vegas and Final Cut. I’m all PC while my associate is all Mac. I’ve given him some PI renders before and they never really worked great due to the method I gave them. We’ll have to try an image sequence to see how it works out. He’s never tried importing an image sequence before in FC.

[Jason Harbaugh]

Gotcha guys. No offense taken. 🙂

Looks like I will be working with image sequences from PI a lot more now. It does seem like one of those items that gets glossed over in any books or tutorials. Easy to miss or in my case, not even think about with my NLE.

I take it Final Cut 5 can take in image sequences as well?

[Jason Harbaugh]

No, it’s not. That expression means they are of equal value, and that’s not the case. Quicktime files with Animation compression and an alpha channel can be signifficantly smaller (we’re talking Gigabytes here) then an uncompressed AVI.
Oh give me a freakin break. Where’s that rolleyes icon when you need it. The end result is the same and I could give a rats ass about file size for this. You like your quickietime and that’s fine and dandy. We were both talking about getting an end result and we’ll leave it at that.

You make that sound like it’s difficult or time consuming.
I actually believed it was until I saw Elvis’ comment. I didn’t notice the image sequence toggle before and it brings them in as a single movie file no less! Alpha and all. You learn something new every day. Since it works that well, even with intense particles, my quest for alpha’d AVI or…cough…MOV isn’t that important with PI. 😉

Yeah, Vegas does have an Open Still Image Sequence checkbox when you select the first image of a sequence. It can’t write out image sequences with alphas, but it can import them no problem.
—
Elvis Deane!

Thanks for the tip! I never saw that checkbox before. What I’ve done in the past is actually bringing the image sequence into flash and rendering out alpha’d swf files which Vegas also handles beautifully. Glad to see that isn’t needed.

[Jason Harbaugh]

Frankly, using uncompressed AVI seems pointless when Quicktime with animation compression is just as good and smaller. If I could have what I want, that would be what I’d like to see in pIllusion QT for both PC and Mac with Alpha.

6 of one, half a dozen of another. I only used AVI as an example because currently that is all that PI supports. If they put in Quicktime support with alpha available I would support that as well.

That’s becasue you’re using an imperfect method. Render with the Remove Black BG option, and you will have a Straight Render with an Alpha – a much better choice for compositing.

But that only renders out individual frames that you then have to recombine into a sequence. Just more steps. Most of the stuff, overlay or luminance key works fine for a quick and dirty job. If I need a well done composite I bring the footage into PI and render the sequence back out from there. It would just be nice to be able to render a full sequence out to AVI or Quicktime with an alpha channel.

Thanks for that tutorial on color fringing. That will come in handy.