Does anyone know of any compositing software that can join a background animation and a figure or figures in the foreground (animation)?

Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Sony Vegas, Ulead Video Studio, Boris FX ....

You can actually do compositing with a couple of freeware utilities (VirtualDub and the AviSynth frameserver), but you'd have to learn the scripting language.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

In case anyone's curious, here's an example of compositing with VDub and AviSynth:

Flo Helsing (widescreen MPEG format, 1.99MB)

The terrain was rendered in Poser. The title was also rendered in Poser, as a separate animation. The two videos were layered together with an AviSynth script processed by VirtualDub. I composited in the moon later, as an afterthought.

An AviSynth script is basically a text file with an .avs extension, which can be written in Notepad. This is the actual script I used:

Layer(AviSource("c:Temp3Furrette2Overlay01b.avi"), Mask(AviSource("c:Temp3Furrette2Overlay02b.avi"), AviSource("c:Temp3Furrette2Overlay02b.avi")), "subtract", 255, 0, 0, 255, true)

If you'd like to learn more about the scripting language, I'd recommend starting here:

http://www.avisynth.org/

Thanks for the link but the animation link came up with an error.

I might have used up my monthly bandwidth allotment. Did you try right-clicking and saving to your hard drive?

That worked.

I couldn't see any details of the landscape until I turned off the lights in my office. Very nice! And thanks for the AviSynth URL.

Wax freeware compositor by Debugmode available here can do what you want too. Prior to the latest (2.0C) version released yesterday, it had a couple of bugs so severe that I didn't that I didn't feel comfortable with recommending it, this latest version really rocks though!

I composited the video at top of the page at this link from Poser and Vue animations using Wax, as well as adding the particle fire FX.

Wax also now supports AviSynth scripts I believe, though I've no idea what they are.

John

Thank you, I will try wax too.

I'd tried Wax earlier, jwhitham, but didn't have much luck with it. Can it use the alpha channel in my AVI videos when compositing?

I've only used alpha in numbered png sequences, that works fine. I haven't tried the new version using tif sequences yet, the old one inversed the alpha, hence the use of png.

Wax is supposed to support alpha in AVIs, but as Vue Pro won't render an animation with alpha - it saves the channel in a separate, monochrome, AVI - and Poser 5 just seems to crash if I render to AVI, I don't really have a source of 32 bit AVI to test it with.

This latest version (2.0c) has got rid of all the bugs I'd come across, although it does still seem to have the bizarre "feature" that you import a numbered sequence by selecting the first file, then control (NOT shift) selecting the last, fine when you get used to it, but not exactly intuitive! I'd recommend giving it another try.

John

Oh, and another one, Zwei-Stein from the, strangely named, Thugs at Bay is also free, it's what I've used for the last couple of years.

The bad news on ZS is a weird interface that takes some getting used to, plus it hasn't been developed for nearly 4 years now and doesn't attempt realtime preview or 16:9.

On the plus side: ZS has the best chroma keying I've seen, bar none, the key-smoothing feature anti-aliasing is just amazing. Once you get used to the interface it's very fast and accurate. Strangely for such old software, it's the only freebie I know of that does DV capture as well. Not that the latter matters if you're running XP of course.

The Thugs website has just has just gained an announcement saying that they are working on a major update for mid July, could be one to watch out for.

John