[John Cuevas]

Wow, Serge!!! Thank You. Have used Zax for a few years now for different applications and had no clue you could do that! Great tutorial, thank you very much!!!!

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Had to do a similiar project about six months ago—cept for a large convention. My problem was a bit different in that the staging company was taking four 16×9 HD plasmas and were going to break the video into 4 seperate vids, each playing in one of the HD’s. On top of that, 90% of the footage was SD.

My approach was to create a looping background to play for the entire piece. Secondly I created a bunch of simple wipes using solid lines of that matched the look of the show. Sometimes 1 line would come from a diagonal, sometimes 2 lines would come from opposite sides, maybe just 1 line wiping from top to bottom.

Next I made individual comps in AE to incorporate the video. One composition might be the video, stretched and blurred, with smaller versions of that same video layered on top. Others, might be 3 PIP’s, but cropped, so box 1 shows the left 1/3, box 2 displays the middle, box 3 the right 1/3. Also did that but offset the boxes in space, so it looked like a staircase. Did some with the same video playing, but offset the time. Others had different shaped boxes, diamonds, odd shapes.

During this stage I created text look for the piece—would layer it over and under(much larger, low opacity…trite, I know). Played with the tranfer modes some.

Finally I put on a couple of pots of coffee and ground it all together.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Where are these classes?

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Distort – offset.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Import your video and the replacement picture. I would stack the video on top, replace picture below. Use the motion tracker & rotation tracker. When you use rotation tracker, it will give you two boxes. Apply each one to corners of your green card.

Apply the tracking data to the replacement picture. Now just key out the green card. If the picture doesn’t line up correctly, just adjust it’s anchor point until it’s where it should be in the frame.

I did a project like this and found that I had to precomp the replacement picture to get it to be sized correctly first. Then do the motion tracking.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Avid is 720×486, DVD’s 720×480. I’ve had issues with this before too, can you crop in Sorenson to 720×480? That way nothing will be squished down or moved.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

You need a ‘demux’ program. This will extract the vobs into a format of your choosing. If you do a google search for demux dvd shareware, you will find quite a few different programs.

I don’t think it will be the original mpegs2’s… Think the demux creates new ones, but they will be good enough for goverment work. Once you are finished, you can bring them right into encore.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Are you using an version earlier then 2.0? I don’t believe they supported QT references correctly.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Okay, I see what you are saying now.

Unless someone knows of a better way to do this, the only thing I can think of would be to build this in menus.

Say you create a main menu. You select video no subtitles. This then switches to a new menu, with the video actually placed as the background, then you could have your buttons still active on top of the video.

Of course this method could only be used if the videos are not so excessive that the menus go over the 1gig limit.

Possibly this could also be achieved in Director, but I’m not familiar with that software at all.

Good Luck

[John Cuevas]

Yes Encore can do this, fairly simply too.

Create your video and import into timeline.

Now take your 3 audio tracks and import them as assets. Right-click timeline will bring up the option to add audio tracks. Add 3, for a total of 4 tracks.

Now link all 4 buttons to that timeline. Click each button, go to the link pulldown and click specify link. This will bring up a menu so you can pick which audio track the timeline plays.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net