[Patrick Adkins]

Sky Replacement. You’ll need footage of storm clouds to composite into your stadium footage (or whatever footage you have). You can shoot storm clouds rolling in or there are various stock footage sites that will have cloud footage. There is a DVD of Real Cloud stock footage on VideoCopilot.net.

Andrew also has a couple tutorials on his site that explain sky replacement:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/sky_replacement.php
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/advanced_sky_replacement/

You can add shadows as the clouds come over. If you want quick and easy, you can use black solid, opacity control, masks, etc. Or you can get technical and use masks and curves/brightness controls on the original footage which would look more realistic.

[Patrick Adkins]

Thanks for all the info guys. The voltage is what concerned me the most, but it looks like the one(s) you’ve got, Jonathan, are 7.2V. I guess I just hadn’t scrolled through enough of the “knock offs”. All I was seeing was 7.4V.

You had some good insight Michael. The possibility of a heat issue with a higher mAh level is something I never really thought about…and a great point about leaving a 3rd party battery in a camera in for service – that is something that could easily slip one’s mind!

And, I could definitely see how the dual battery charger would be very handy on a shoot.

Thanks again!

[Patrick Adkins]

I think the “black solid” you are referring to is the default color of the transparent background. You can check this by clicking the “Show Transparency” button. It is a button under the viewer that looks like a checkerboard. When you click that button it should change the black color to the transparent checkerboard. The black color can also be changed to other colors and just serves as a way to better see what you are doing.

To export the ring with transparency put it in your render queue and choose “RGB + Alpha” in the settings. Once it has been exported with its alpha, you should be able to lay the ring over footage in your NLE.