overlay transparencies

[jake7363]

Hello,
I have searched the board and found a few posts that come close but do not really address my problem.
I am trying to use an photo portrait that I have edited to be the head only, with a transparent background. I used Macromedia Fireworks to do this. I then exported into a .png, 32 bit. But the background comes out white when I open it in Video Studio 8.

What I am trying to do is have movie clip playing in the foreground, fade the head in and out, without closing off the clip. What happens with the white background using the fade filter is that the portrait fades in, and the white background blocks out the clip.

Any info/help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Joe

[Ken Berry]

When you say .png 32 bit, I assume you include alpha channel???

[Ron P.]

I just loaded up VS8 to check this out. I had a 24 bit .png and a 24 bit .tga image that I had done in PSP9. Both had the alpha channel/transparent background. The .tga image produced the white background, where the .png image maintained the transparency.

This is a little odd, in VS9 I get better results with a tga then png....


Ken;
Nice sig...

[jake7363]

Yes, that is Alpha channel. And it shows transparent in Firefox, obviously. I tried in Paintshop Pro v8, but that only has 24bit so that is out, as well.

[daniel]

I'm not sure I understand what you want to do, but if you use the overlay image (any) with the chroma key function to eliminate background, and then position is where you like, while applying the standard brightness filter you can fade-in and out as you like (using four key frames)..

The fade-in / fade-out function of the overlay is anavailable concurrently with the chroma key though

Edit:
Oops, I'm sorry, I just saw you mentioned VS8....

[jake7363]

Am I understanding correctly that in VS 9, there is a chroma key feature that addresses the transparency issue?

Thanks,
joe

[daniel]

yes indeed, check the 30 days trial.
You could use it to produce just that sequence as an AVI file then include it in your project.

You don't even need a transparent background if it's reasonably different from the rest and even, since the chroma key color (range) can be selected directly from the overlaid image.
On the other hand if you have the transparancy you could just use the fade in/out function, a little bit easier than the filter.

And instead of fading you can also have it move in and out from/to any side or corner if it better fits the background video.

One of the key (pun intended) novelties of VS9.

[jake7363]

Thanks for the info... in the long haul, that seems to be more to my benefit than trying to work with third-party software...

Much appreciated,

Joe