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tharding
06-03-2005, 01:59 PM
What about PNG?

samsc
06-03-2005, 05:05 PM
no idea.

did you test it?

tharding
07-03-2005, 01:27 AM
It is the 24bit version of GIF.

Supports transparency and is much better at drop shadows than PSD files and much smaller in file size.

Files seem to load up at about the same speed as JPEG but obviously with the advantage of transparency.

Cheers

Toby

samsc
07-03-2005, 01:40 AM
do you have one you can post?

i wonder whether its premultiplied alpha?

tharding
07-03-2005, 04:20 AM
Here you go.

samsc
07-03-2005, 07:47 AM
Your file opens as a single layer transparent image in photoshop which is good.
I have never used png files before- but they seem to work, and do the same thing as tif files.

I have done 4 attachments.

The PNG file in photoshop.
The PNG against white in catalyst
PNG against black in catalyst
PNG against colour in catalyst

Can you check and tell me that this is what you intended?

samsc
07-03-2005, 12:29 PM
toby.

i moved your postings onto a new thread so this is more visible

tharding
07-03-2005, 01:57 PM
I use PNG almost exclusively already.

I just did a 10 year retrospective of the Australian F1 Grand Prix using all 8 layers and lots of transparency.

All worked extremely well using some 600 still shots.

Cheers

Toby

tharding
07-03-2005, 02:02 PM
Yes those shots show how well it works and obviously the resolution can be much higher than that.

As you can see you don't get the white fringing on the drop shadow as you would with Photoshop and the glow effect works well too.

Cheers

Toby

samsc
07-03-2005, 02:28 PM
PNG. all looks good to me.

photoshop files seem to do pre-multiplied alpha! which for the uninitiated is a bit troublesome.

samsc
07-03-2005, 02:30 PM
I use PNG almost exclusively already.

I just did a 10 year retrospective of the Australian F1 Grand Prix using all 8 layers and lots of transparency.

All worked extremely well using some 600 still shots.

Cheers

Toby

toby.

how did you program this?

you dont have to worry about pre-loading with stills images - to much, as there is plenty of time to load images, as the show runs?

tharding
08-03-2005, 05:18 AM
There were 2 Catalysts. One doing the left side and one doing the right side of a 16m x 4.2m screen wiht a 20% overlap.

Some of the stills were turned into montages that scrolled across screen usiing the cylinder, others were still shots that went with a poem that just crossfaded between two layers. Lots of mark cues in the programming.

Attached is an early sample of the look. It is the wrong aspect ratio but you get the idea. This used all eight layers with layers 3 & 4 doing the feature shots in the middle. Every other element is on a separate layer. the stopwatch is animated and was a 320 x 240 movie. The photos on the side were slowly scrolling and statistics from that year were scrolling in the opposite direction next to them.

The other part was big shots at max resolution doing slow moves across screen to a live opera singer. Very straight forward crossfade between layers with a slow 20 sec move using movespeed to smooth it out.

The only problem with the stills is that any movie that is playing jitters as a photo loads up, but as the only movie I was using was a background texture it wasn't really noticeable. It would still be great to have some form of preload for this or some form of RAM disk.

Cheers

Toby