Help and advice appreciated

Brian

I happened to me too and it's pretty frustrating. Some clips have just a bit of semi-transparent pixels at the edges. Cropping will not do. If you have After Effects you can load the clip in a comp, add a oval mask, keep it smaller than the size of the clip, about 8/10 of the size, feather the mask, probably around 20 pixels. Move the mouse outside the mask so that you can see the value of the pixels in the verify info panel. If the register at 0,0,0 then you are all set. Save the clip with a new name, load it in Carrara and it should work.

 You can skip the stock billboard and do the same thing with a vertex plane. However, with a vertex plan you can UV map it so the texture edge falls just outside of the geometry which will solve your problem.

Mark

Thanks Preta and Mark.
 I don't like UVs but I will give the idea a try.

Brian

To know them is to love them. :-D

Mark
In trying the solution relating to the movie in my first post, I found some problems in trying to use the Sparrowhawke Follow Terrain with the Vertex Plane idea.

However, I found you could change the Billboard (dont know about the Splat) into a Vertex object and do the UV thinghy to it. Then the Follow Terrain worked ok!

Life is strange!

Brian

The explosion sequence is on a Vertex Plane and travells from L to R.
The mouse walk sequence (R to L) is on the vertex adapted Billboard using the Sparrowhawke Follow Terrain.

The background is just a jpeg Backdrop behind the simple Terrain

Brian

For the explosion, try duplicating the color channel into the glow channel but dial down the texture intensity to about 10 percent to help illuminate it.  Just rambling...

Yes. And I applied a Value of 10% at frame 1 and 90% at the last frame.
A VERY interesting modification to the visual effect of the original.

Thanks again.

Brian