After Effects opacity/transparency/alpha

[morse]

Two questions-

1) I'm applying some animated effects to text. I apply the effects to the text using silhouette alpha (different layers). My question is how to make the black background either a) transparent or b) an image that isn't effected by the effects layer. I hope you understand what I mean.

2) What is the best way to AE clips in flash? I know sequences of jpgs lag flash like hell, so would I be better off using small movie clips? What would you suggest?

[.soulty]

1) i dont have a clear idea on what you mean here.

2) i would suggest a .mov file, flash can compress that pretty well. wmv works even better.(sorenson3 for the .mov)

[simplistik]

To make it so the background isn't affected by the effects make a seperate composition put your bg in it, then import your effects comp into the bg comp on the top layer.

I don't think you can make it transparent. I could be wrong.

[DDD]

I dont follow you ont eh transparency thing, but for the use in flash question. It kinda depends on whether you need control over the clip. How often it plays, How big it is....blah blah. I usually roll with an .av or .flv. I have a friend who is a sound/video freak and has some tool that can compress the hell out of video files. Also if you do sequenced jpgs. I would do a batch compression in PS and Fireworks.

[morse]

simplistik, thank you, that's exactly what I needed to know.

Soulty and 3D, thanks as well. I used sorenson on a client project, needed a gig and a half of movies to fit on a cd, and it compressed them to a couple hundred megs. Anyways, I was going to use some small and medium sized clips, and I don't need much control over them.

Thanks for the help.

[mlk]

1) if you use silhouette alpha then if i am correct the rest of your text layer is transparent, thus revealing the layer underneath it.. which could be another layer (solid or image) with its own effects...

[morse]

Draging the composition to a new one worked prefectly. However, importing into flash didn't... If I render the movie as pngs, it works alright, but that's a lot of bytes. Instead I would like to render it as a .mov, compress in sorenson, and import, but the gradient background looks like total crap, and I don't know why. It's not the sorenson compression, because if I import the raw .mov (40 megs) it looks exactly the same as the sorenson-ed .mov (150k). I'm setting the quality to 100 when I import into flash, so I don't know what could be wrong...

[.soulty]

hmmm tricky, by any chance did you select million colours +

::edit:: looked in ae, notice that you can only select million colours when you use sorenson 3. have you tried avi?, wmv?

[.soulty]

btw what version of flash are you using? i know for a fact that they have improved the video in flashmx 2004 pro. ive tried it myself and it looks and runs fine.

[morse]

Oh, I'm using MX still... Perhaps that could be it. And you suggest millions+ ?

[mlk]

are you talking about movie transparency in flash ???

There was a thread about it not too long ago and I think the conclusion was that you could not have transparency with movies in flash...

[simplistik]

No he's on movie size when importing to flash, I already gave him the solution to the transparency thing issue.

[.soulty]

Oh, I'm using MX still... Perhaps that could be it. And you suggest millions+ ?dont think the million+ will matter. Maybe try windows media (wmv).

[morse]

After some trial-and-error, I'v decided that png sequences seem to work best, although there are still some issues with the gradient looking funny, as well as movie size...