Transparent or Pre-Keyed Animations

AnimationWorld · Post by **AnimationWorld** » Sat Sep 17, 2011 7:12 am

Can you make an animation without a background, transparent, pre-keyed to use in live action videos.

Basically to overlay an animated character or banner on to live action video footage.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Sat Sep 17, 2011 8:45 am

Just render with alpha channel, that's it.

dueyftw · Post by **dueyftw** » Sat Sep 17, 2011 1:54 pm

In movie format: QuickTime png millions of colors+

Single frame at time just png.

If you can use single frame at a time in your compositor it will most likely be better quality results than a movie import.

Dale

SvenFoster · Post by **SvenFoster** » Sat Sep 17, 2011 2:32 pm

dueyftw wrote:In movie format: QuickTime png millions of colors+

Single frame at time just png.

If you can use single frame at a time in your compositor it will most likely be better quality results than a movie import.

Dale

I heard that and thought that to be true but after reading up on codecs and such it appears that the animation codec is 'lossless' at high quality settings...ie.. same as png files...might still be worth having the audio separate..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation_codec

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Sat Sep 17, 2011 9:53 pm

I prefer PNG codec over Animation - although theoretically the latter should be lossless, I've found it to produce articfacts (horizontal lines of different colour).

hayasidist · Post by **hayasidist** » Sun Sep 18, 2011 11:25 am

I use "do not premultiply" / uncompressed AVI out (Windows / ASP7) to composite in Premiere. I haven't explictly installed any new codecs - so either there aren't any or whatever I use has done it automatically. Never had any isses with the artefacts that slowtiger mentions. Here's an example (for sure the animation could be better -- but ... it shows the principle):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHnPfl42jes

multiple AS outputs composited with live action and pngs..