Hy guys, i've a big question for you: "Which it is the best way to make a Video mixing Real video material with 3D ?" For example: i've to add on an existing video (a wonderful valley movie taked with a sony camcorder) a 3D animation of a bear... which is the best way ? I think to use Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effect (or Discreet Combustion) for effect abd video editing. But for 3D? 3DSMAX, POSER, MAYA, or ...? And how can i make it? I think to render the bear in blue screen and after it add to video... Ok... i'll waiting for your suggestion Thanks to all bye x-man

After Effects is the standard for compositing, unless you've got the dough($), then combustion is considered by many to be superior. Premier has very limited compositing abilities. 3D? Any of these programs can do the animation. Also consider Carrara, Animation:Master, and others. The best way to generate the 3D files would be to create your scene, then output (at the same resolution as the video files you have,) your animation as an image sequence. This will generate an individual file for every frame of your animation. This way you can avoid compression artifacts that ALL of the formats will give. As far as blue screen goes, (or green screen for that matter,) you'll just have to setup complicated filters to accuratly eliminate the background key with disturbing your foreground elements. Instead, when you set-up your output, specify that your software will generate an 'alpha channel' for each image. This is an extra channel in the image file that is a greyscale of your scene. Anything that is (usually) black in this channel, your compositing program will make transparent. If you place your video file's layer behind the 3D files layer in the timeline, your video will show through. Each program will have different ways about specifying these settings, soooo, it's manual reading time. Do some simple experiments with them to make sure you COMPLETLY understand how to make it work with your setup. And through all this.... don't forget to have fun! :>

You also need some sort of 3d Tracking software, like Matchmover. This will allow you to gather data from your video footage that can be duplicated in a 3d program so that the 3D camera will match the one used to take the video. This is very important or the bear will not properly "fit" into the scene. Lighting becomes very critical in the 3d world as well. When you see on the making of documentaries in a scene where there is going to be 3d stuff added later, they will hold up a shiny globe and a camera will take a picture of it. This will pinpoint the locations of the realworld lights and their colors. This image is then taken into a program that calculates the contrast and colors within the picture and then spits out data that will be used to create a lighting scheme within the 3d program that will replicate the real world lighting. You can download a program(freeware) that will take jpeg images that were shot of of a chrome globe and do the calculations of the lighting. I know that it can import into Maya. I can't remember what it is called, you can look for it on the web under "HDRI lighting".