[Michael Escher]

Thanks so much for your help on this. I really appreciate that you and others take the time to help us who are less than knowledgeable about these sorts of things.

God bless the cow.

Best.

Michael Escher

[Michael Escher]

I was given a number of clips with similar properties (one of the actual subject, one of a luma matte of the same clip) and have been able to key it using the track matte set to luma as was suggested above, but now I need to export the footage as video with an alpha channel. How do I do that in AE? What are my codec options? I’m working on a mac with quicktime files but the final deliverables are supposed to be AVI files. Can I deliver AVI files with alpha channels from AE 7 pro on a mac machine?

Thanks,

Michael Escher

[Michael Escher]

UPDATE: I reached near the end of the tape (a little over 58 minutes) and FCP crashed again, even without a time code break. I’m gonna try to hit escape just before 58 minutes and see if the program will at least retain that much of the capture.

[Michael Escher]

Right. I just thought that there was something special to be done. I’m looking at my AE output module compression settings and it appears that prores 422 and prores 422 HQ are already offered in the pull down menu.

Thanks again.

[Michael Escher]

Thanks for your input Jeremy. I really appreciate it.

I assume that we are talking about after effects 7 here. Once I trash my prefs, how do I set it up in my render queue to output to the prores codec?

[Michael Escher]

This may not be the forum to ask the following question, but I’m guessing you all would know this as well. If I capture to prores 422, can work with it in AE for my compositing? As far as I know AE can pretty much ingest anything. Can it output in the same codec/resolution? FYI, I have a mac pro (3ghz dual core), 5 gigs of RAM and a Kona LHe card and breakout box if that makes a difference.

[Michael Escher]

Well, I have a Kona LHe card which I think can do the de-interlacing as on the fly as I ingest the material. But I’m still hoping that someone can come up with a decent compression codec to use for the green screening (either in FCP or AE) . I’ve heard DVCPROHD is a good way to go but would like to get more feedback from you folks in the forum.

[Michael Escher]

I thought that I’d ask my question here, even though this thread is over two years old.

I’ve followed the sage advice and bought a Extron BBG 6 A blackburst generator a couple of years ago before I went to HD. Since I switched to HD I bought a Kona LHe and JVC BR-HD50 deck. The deck doesn’t have any ref in but the card does. I’ve never had any issues with capture or playback but I kept the Extron box after selling my old SD gear and hooked the ref in from the card to the blackburst generator because I was told that was the thing to do to avoid any bugaboos.

The question that came to me the other day while dusting my editing set up and re-patching all the cords is does the Extron box do me any good? I am shooting and editing in HDV, sometimes in 24p and sometimes not, but almost always in HDV. The Extron box puts out a signal for either NTSC or PAL (I had it set to NTSC the whole time).

Does the reference signal have to match the video, or does it matter one way or another as long as you are feeding some sort, or any sort of reference signal?

[Michael Escher]

That took care of it.

Thanks David.

Mike Escher