[Mike Smith]

Although on re-reading your posts I see you say the video was originally published to DVD. I was wondering what might be the reason for wanting to make a specifically CDROM version …?

[Mike Smith]

Why not do this job as a simple DVD? DVD offers excellent quality, great cross-platform compatibility and easily allow for the level of interactivity you want. Cheap and dcecent tools include Sonic’s ReelDVD, Sony’s DVD Architect, and on the Mac DVDStudioPro is good. And there’s always Encore.

If you have to use Flash again after a long layoff, it will take you a little time to get back up to speed. And you’ll maybe need to think about the many users who don’t yet have Flash 8 installed, and how to help them to update … a lot of hassle for you if you just want to play them video with a couple of menus.

The big plus of Flash compression is for web delivery – great quality for the bandwidth. But DVD quality is still good – a well-encoded mpeg2 file for DVD at a decent data rate is going to look better than most highly-compressed files in whatever format.

Of course if you want web delivery and the ability to populate a menu with updatable choices , all at decent (for the web) quality, then Flash is a great answer.

If you do want to go the Flash way, this thread from the Flash forum may be of use to you. https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=190&postid=857614&pview=t#head

[Mike Smith]

I haven’t seen interlacing-like problems with DV in AE. DV in PAL is lower field first, of course … Not sure why you would de-interlace in Photoshop.

[Mike Smith]

Time to think about taking on some more help, Aanarav!

[Mike Smith]

Or even consider using a Flash video format. Take a look at https://www.on2.com/video_samples/flix-video-samples/
to see where they’re going with that – very good quality-for-file-size performmance, and cross platform.

[Mike Smith]

If you have AE PRo, you could cut the picture, and when finished render an uncompressed file for After Effects and use the Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse plugin.

Or Barend has a basic tute at
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/onneweer_barend/colorgrading_1/index.html

[Mike Smith]

Looking ahead to HDV, you might want to consider that workflow carefully, and look at the HDV forum posts.

At present, the http://www.cineform.com approach appears to have a lot to be said for it – which might influence your thinking.

[Mike Smith]

You can achieve a great deal with the built-in effects esp if you have the Pro edition. Then CC Light Rays, CC Light Burst and CC Light Sweep are all worth experiment with.

If you don’t have these, it may be more challenging.

At one time Adobe had an AE tutorial using a castle interior, demonstrating a light “rays of light” effect, which used just duplicated layers, directional blur and transfer modes, and which worked very well. But success probably depends on the source and patience, and may be quite time-consuming.

Good luck.

[Mike Smith]

Toaster long gone? I thought it just morphed into the VideoToaster 4 – VT4 …

Have a look at https://www.newtek.com/vt/broadcast.php

at the currebnt newtek site …

[Mike Smith]

Didn’t Newtek’s Toaster / VT4 do something like this (if in 8 bit)?