[Kevin Camp]

this is a good tutorial here at creative cow by aharon robinowitz you should take a look at:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=2&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/straight_vs_premult/index.html

but a quick answer to your question, you need to render to a codec/format that can contain alpha chanel data (like lossless animtion, tiff seq., etc) and you need to set the render to render an alpha chanel in the render settings (check the help menu).

however, in qt, you will not be able to see your alpha chanel, you will need to take it into ae or your avid (at import into avid you need to seleect invert alpha to reverse the key).

[Kevin Camp]

i am using the pro version of ae7 (maybe that’s the difference?)

[Kevin Camp]

i don’t own flip4mac (i hear a lot about it), but i believe it works with qt. but if it gets installed as a qt component then it should be accessible from the render settings, select qt as the format and then hit the format options button and select it there (i’m theorizong here, again i don’t have the software… they may sicuss this on thier website).

i’m on a mac here too, and if i can seen my comp in the preview window and select the file menu in ae (not make movie or add to render queue), i can see an option for export… from there i can see options for avi, dv stream and windows media. aside from the blackmagic decklink and avid meridien codecs i don’t have anything special on this machine.

i had forgotten about exporting renders (versus rendering), i used to have to ‘export’ dv streams for a deko that didn’t like qt dv files that using the ‘render’ method creates.

[Kevin Camp]

interesting that a qt pref file would create problems when importing into another piece of software. also that it persisted after a reinstall of the system software…

[Kevin Camp]

try to take your stablized footage comp and make it large enough to so the footage stays with in the frame. then create a new comp with the frame size of your footage (and frame rate, etc), bring in your stablized footage comp and key frame position to keep it in frame. just enough keys to keep the pan (or tilt) movement of the camera, not the shake.

[Kevin Camp]

now that i’m looking at the export setting is ae… i notice that you can export avi and wmv via the file>export menu. however there are no hd settings… is this for the client to view or are they editing these?

if they are just viewing these you could export an avi using a sd codec. if they are editing, find out what they are using natively and see if you can render to (or download) that codec.

[Kevin Camp]

i think flip4mac may help… i don’t think it will create .avi files but it will create .wmv files

[Kevin Camp]

so, it would seem to be ae…

when you create your comp to put the .mov file in are you dragging the .mov file on to the new composition button at the bottom of the project window (the little film strip icon)? if you create your comp that way, the comp settings will take on media the properties of the .mov file, ruling out mistake.

in addition you could disable opengl in ae prefs, this can help some render/redraw issues in ae. you might also check the frame rate in the time controls panel and make sure it jives with your comp.

i’m grasping a bit, but you could try to purge all from the edit menu (mac ae7). i once had a wierd issue on an old g4, where it rendered all kinds of strange things that didn’t exist in particular comp, and it seemed that it hadn’t purged info from previous projects, forcing ae to purge helped. i assume you’ve tried rebooting already.

this does seem very unusual.

[Kevin Camp]

i have qt7.1.3 and ae7.0.1 running on 2 similar g5s (ati video cards, the only real difference) at work without any import issues. that’s why i was curious about the codec, thinking it may be a corrupt codec.

one of our g5s had random crashes that i finally tracked to a bad ram module, i didn’t discover that until i ran hardware test.

[Kevin Camp]

at this point i would try to add the paint bucket effect to you ai layer, set the fill selector to alpha and the color to whatever you want. then add a glow effect and adjust as needed.

next time you may want to create your ai file in the color that you’ll need in ae.