PNG Transparancy

dave999 wrote on 10/31/2006, 7:35 PM
I made a DVD menu in Corel Draw X3. I made a rectangle in the center so a video could play under the menu and have only a small slit of the video show. I exported the image as a 24 bit RGB PNG and selected the rectangle color to be transparant. If I make the rectangle color black, white or gray, it works fine. If I use another color, such as red, it displays in Vegas as a red rectangle. The problem is that my menu design has lots of shades of gray, white and black (it has a company logo on it), so the resulting menu looks very bad. If I export the image as an 8 bit palleted RGB PNG Vegas will display the red rectangle as transparant, but the image is dithered and looks awful. Exporting as a GIF has the same result. I have tried all three of the images' media properties alpha channel settings in Vegas with no luck. I also tried exporting the file as a 24 bit PNG and opening it in Photoshop and exporting it again with a transparant color with the same result, so Corel Draw isn't to blame.

So...how do I use a 24 bit RGP PNG image with a transparancy in Vegas 7?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Comments

ScottW wrote on 10/31/2006, 8:07 PM
In order to export information regarding transparency, you need to go 32 bit.

I'm trying to understand what you want from you menu, so forgive me if I get some of this wrong from your perspective.

If you are creating a motion menu, with video like this, the best way would be to composit everything in Vegas and not try to export anything with transparency.

Design your menu layout, position the video clip you want in the menu (all in Vegas), and render as uncompressed AVI (or DV AVI if you don't have much in the way of titles) - this is then used in DVDA . Do not render as MPEG-2 since DVDA will have to recompress it.

--Scott
Sunflux wrote on 11/1/2006, 4:04 PM
You aren't using alpha transparency with CorelDRAW?

If you really want the video to show through completely and have the rest of the menu solid, just make sure you have NOTHING in that part of your design, and when exporting the PNG ensure that the "transparent background" option is ticked on the options box.

if you want to get fancy and have parts of your design semi-transparent, all you have to do is use the Interactive Transparency tool on your objects (you can specify uniform, graduated, pattern, etc.), and then when exporting again ensure that the "Transparent Background" box is ticked on the export options window. When you load the PNG in Vegas all will be correct - you won't need to specify any additional transparency options.

Corel works sort of automatically with transparencies; there's no hoops to jump through like with some Adobe programs, or need to work in 32-bit mode.
dave999 wrote on 11/1/2006, 5:56 PM
That got it!

Thank you!!