Using the Video Overlay as a transition

When Cool3D Production Studio finishes rendering, you will have a video overlay that you can use. In MediaStudio Pro 8, open a new project (Figure 54). This should bring up a dialog box that lets you select the type of project. Since this example assumes NTSC DV, make the selections indicated in Figure 55 and click OK. This will create an empty video project. In the timeline, add a short video to the Video1 track. This will be the video that we are transitioning from. Click on the "Insert Video File" icon in the timeline (Figure 56). This brings up a dialog box where you can select a video clip (Figure 57). Select a video of your own to add to the timeline and click Open. Remember, the video overlay is 3 seconds in duration so be sure to select a clip that is at least that long.

Figure 54

Figure 55

Figure 56

Figure 57

Figure 58

Figure 59

Lastly, left click on the video overlay clip in the Video3 track to select it. Now right click to bring up the context menu and select "Media Source Options" (Figure 61). Make the selection shown in Figure 62. This tells MSP that the video overlay was created with fields rather than being frame based. See Figure 53 to review the options used when the video overlay was created.

Figure 60

Figure 61

Figure 62

Notice the little red icon on the video overlay clip in the Video3 track. MSP automatically detected that this clip was generated with a transparent background and set the overlay options for you. With the clip in Video3 still selected, click on the first keyframe in the Effects manager. You can see that MSP selected Alpha Channel as the overlay type (Figure 63).

Figure 63

Now is a good time to save your project. To do this, follow the same basic steps outlined in Figures 13 and 14. Finally, we are ready to preview the transition. In the preview window, click on the Play icon (Figure 64). Now we can see that the graphic comes into view on top of the video as we expected.

Figure 64

But wait. As soon as the graphic appears on the screen, the entire backgound is replaced with the video clip in the Video2 track. We wanted the clip in the Video2 to only show through on the inside portion of the disc. Something is missing! We need to somehow mask out the portions of Video2 that are not in the disc's center. We need a video matte. A video matte can be used on the clip in Video2 to mask out the portions of the video that we don't want to appear. Ok, so how do we get this magic video matte?

Fortunately, we already have most of what we need. Lets go back to Cool3D Production Studio and load our project. Using the same procedures that we used in Figures 13 and 14, save it with a different name (THS3VMatte.c3d for example).