The Video Overlay

1. You can use the Cool3D project file itself, the .c3d file, in MSP 8's timeline. This works well, however, there is no way to select the output quality of the overlay or adjust the overlay settings in MSPs timeline. Also, if your final video will be shown on an interlaced device, such as a television, you cannot set the field order of the animation. I have had problems in the past with jittery movement when using this method. Also, every time you use the overlay in MSPs timeline, Cool3D must render the animation again.

2. You can create an uncompressed 32-bit .avi file in Cool3D for import into MSPs timeline. This method, to me, is preferrable because you can control the output quaility that Cool3D uses to generate the animation. As well, you can set the field order in the output .avi to match your MSP project. For field-based projects, this ALWAYS results in a smooth animation. There are drawbacks to doing it this way however. Cool3D takes FOREVER to create the .avi file. As well, the .avi file that is generated is enormous. For this particular animation, the .avi overlay file that Cool3D generated was 119 MB in size and took around 4 hours to render. On the up side, once you create the .avi file, it does not have to be rendered again no matter how many times you use it. Another advantage is that you can use a video overlay of this type in most other video editing packages.

3. Finally, you can create an Image Sequence file. It consists of one .tga image file per video frame.

For the purposes of this project, I used an uncompressed .avi. To do this, select Export Video Overlay/AVI from the file menu (Figure 52). This will bring up the Save as Video File dialog (Figure 53) where you can assign a name to the video file being created. Be prepared to wait after you click Save. It will take a while.

Figure 52

Figure 53