Export with white or transparant background with Debut?

[Amphioxys]

Hi!
I am using Anime Studio Debut 11 and am pretty new to this.

I have been working on an animation with a white background to be integrated into a YouTube video. However, whenever I tried to export it, its crispy white background becomes "tainted" with some blueish hue, perhaps due to the compression? I have been trying to export in all useable formats available to me (m4v, mp4, avi), but with the same results. I set the quality to 100%, turned off settings like "extra smooth images", but no other settings are presented enabling me to do something about the background.

This is quite annoying, since the different background stands out very clearly against the white background of my video project in Camtasia. If I could make the background transparent, that would solve it too...

I have been googling, but all the answers I could find did not seem to apply, as they're dealing with older/other version and feature a host of settings, that I do not have.

I hope anyone can provide me with some insights! Thanks!

[slowtiger]

When you create a new AS file, the "background" you see is just transparent. If you go into Project Settings you can set a colour to that BG which should get rendered in the final video, but is invisible in project view. I think if you export your file with transparency, that BG gets transparent again, and if you export without transparency it shows the colour you've set.

I avoid confusion by just creating a background layer with a filled rectangle (or an image).

[Amphioxys]

Gosh! I had that darned background colour selected in the project settings! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

[Amphioxys]

I think if you export your file with transparency, that BG gets transparent again

Incidentally, how do you export with transparency? I don't see such a setting anywhere!

[Greenlaw]

...Incidentally, how do you export with transparency? I don't see such a setting anywhere!

If you're compositing layers from Anime Studio (like in After Effects or Fusion), it's best to render PNG because it's a compact but lossless format and it supports transparency.

Some movie formats also support an alpha channel but image sequences are far more efficient to work with. Images require a fraction of the RAM to render, and if the renderer crashes. you will only need to render the missing or bad frames. With a movie format, the entire sequence needs to be stored in RAM before it can be saved, and if you have any bad frames, you will need to re-render the entire movie, which can be an unnecessary waste of time.

G.

[slowtiger]

With Quicktime I use the PNG codec with Millons+ colours to indicate I want the alpha channel (the transparency) exported. In newer OSX I use Apple ProRes 4444 which indicates 4 channels: RGB and alpha.

[Amphioxys]

All, right... But how do I make a sequence of images into a video?

And I don't get a "PNG codec" with Quicktime (I assume you mean M4V) format. I just get "Apple M4V (H.264-AAC)". No further options...

I am missing some information that you're not telling me here...

[slowtiger]

I am missing some information that you're not telling me here...

Because I only give you the essentials, Quicktime has become a complicated beast.
32bit: QT works nicely on Mac and Windows, with PNG codec and everything.
64bit: No QT on Win, different QT on Mac, "legacy" codecs still available but slower in rendering.

Images to video: that's a feature of your video editing software - not all of them have it.

[cynthia]

thank you, thank you Slow Tiger for the update on how to export a Quicktime movie with transparency. It's not in the latest manual. I just did as you recommended and now have my little jumping mouse to composite onto the background.