VT[5] Questions

[Rick M]

Hello everyone, I was hoping you guys could help me. I'm in charge of a college television station and we recently installed the NewTek VT software. We either have version 5 or 4, but I believe it is 5; still waiting on confirmation.

I've been looking over a PDF of the manual and was hoping to get a question answered before I go in to actually work on the product.

My main question is whether it's possible to set up a camera, key out the green screen, and put a .mov file in the background as the replacement. I believe this is possible through use of the DDR's, but wanted to confirm if and how it's possible.

A second question I was wondering is whether or not I can overlay a .mov (that is a running L3RD, exported from After Effects as a .mov with an alpha channel) over a live broadcast and have the system recognize the alpha channel in the video file.

I know these seem fairly basic, but I was just hoping to get confirmation before I sit down with the system. The equipment being used previously is so old and outdated that it didn't support alpha channels, so if this new system does what I think it does (based off reading the manual) this is a vast improvement.

[kltv]

That should be possible. The process is a little fuzzy in my memory on the VT, but I think it was a little difficult to get to that cleanly. If I remember right, the keyer is setup in the Input Setup. once you have that turned on, I believe that the Effects row will show up behind the chromakey. So you'd put the DDR in the Effects row and the camera on PVW/PGM.

You can use alpha channel in the DDRs with a render from After Effects. I can't remember if it like Quicktime with Alpha, but it should like an .AVI with alpha. I know I've used those. If you have time, it seemed to work better to pass those through the editor and send them out as a .RTV file from there. That played better in the DDRs. I believe you could also render straight to RTV from After Effects if you have the codec installed on your After Effects machine, which would have to be a PC and not a Mac.

Kris

[billmi]

As long as the DDR can play the MOV (proper codec support on that machine) it can, yes. If not, you may need to transcode it to a format supported by the VT.

In VT4, you'd use the DSK for that key, in VT5, you'd use LiveMatte.

[Rick M]

Thanks for the tips guys. I get to get in and work with it on Monday and I've got several test renders of different things ready to see where or what my limitations are.

Unfortunately, the computers we use are all macs, and I do want to try and avoid the extra transcoding step making .AVI files for Windows (as far as I know, the best way to make an .AVI from Mac After Effects is to render a lossless Quicktime and then transcode with another program). So, hopefully I can avoid this step.

[kltv]

If you have Final Cut on those Macs, they will already have Quicktime Pro installed. You can use that to convert from Animation compressed MOVs to Uncompressed AVIs fairly quickly, but it is an extra step. If you don't have Final Cut I think Apple still sells that for $20 to $50.

Kris

[animlab]

You should make sure your software is VT4 or VT5 since they are using different keying pocedures.