I discovered it by accident. I placed one of the clips on the content cd (the flame thingy), right clicked on it and set the alpha channel to premultiplied and I noticed that the video on the other track showed through the black portions of the overlay video.

Not all the content CD clips have this alpha channel thing, though.

*BUMP*

I am also curious ... Is it possible to create a 'homemade' video clip with Alpha-Transparency and if so, wheta is the best software to use? Do you just use a black (0,0,0,0) background? If so - there are some .avi files on their content CD (Particularly, Explosion5.avi) that does NOT work correctly. I would like to fix this video since I have a use for it.

Thanx

-DirkyBoy

Someone mentioned before that the only clips that supported the transparent background in VF are ones using a certain codec. I can't remember which one it wuz, but if you found out, maybe if you made your videos with a black background and then rendered it using that codec? Maybe it would work then? I've noticed the only ones I can use from the content CD that will be transparent using the "premultiplied" option, are the ones that are "video 1." Uncompressed AVI clips. Don't know if this helps any, but thats what I've gathered.

Well, it's more to go on that what I had! SO thanks! I am still interested to know if there is a video-editing program that can infuse the Alpha channel correctly so we can design our own alpha tracks. This would be really great and would make using the cookie cutter for PiP and the such unecessary. Not to mention animated gifs could be rendered and used as video overlays...

"I am still interested to know if there is a video-editing program that can infuse the Alpha channel correctly so we can design our own alpha tracks. "

vegas Video does this-

Okay - I know you want to tout your own product here - but really - I'm not spending that much money just to get Alpha channel effects ... I'm SURE there's a piece of software more affordable that can achieve this?

I respect the fact that you are remaining within the confines of your product line to bolster it - however, I'm not buying an entire cadillac just to take the tires off and put them on my VW.

DirkyBoy said "...I'm not buying an entire cadillac just to take the tires off and put them on my VW."

What you're doing is expecting a cadillac for the price of a VW. High end applications have a higher price tag BECAUSE they include high end features.

You get what you PAY for.

In keeping with good forum etiquette, I did a search on my question of how to make videos that would overlay with transparency in VF and found this thread. Since no one actually answered the question of how to make videos that do this, I decided that I would take a stab at figuring it out. I used a free utility from DynaPel called VideoScope to look at the properties of the videos on the content CD that worked with Alpha channel premultiplied and those that didn’t. (e.g., Explosion 4.avi works while Explosion 5.avi doesn’t)

What I found was that the files that worked were saved with a color depth of 32 bits while those that didn’t used 24 bits. So I got out my trust copy of VirtualDub and loaded Explosion 5.avi and selected Video->Color Depth from the menu and picked 32-bit (TrueColor/16M+alpha) from the popup dialog. I then just resaved the video to my hard drive and it worked when I brought it into VF as an overlay.

So the answer to all the people looking for an inexpensive way of creating video with alpha channels to use as overlays in VF is to get a free copy of VirtualDub and save them as 32bit. Hope this helps some of you.

~jr

Many thanks for that info - it's been a great help!!

Ian G.