[GEM-dev] Alpha channel support

[B. Bogart]

Hey all,

After seeing tom's nice work online I realized I've been missing
something in Gem. He is using alpha channels in video using Gem on winXP!!

This is a feature I've been hoping for for years. (in 2003 when creating
Oracle I had to use still-images and pix_masks to create anti-aliased
text on a video background.)

So being inspired by Tom I gave a real effort to alpha channels on OSX.

The GREAT news(!) is that I can load images with pix_image (tiffs) with
intact alpha channels! It is truely a beutiful thing to see!

So after this success I went to video. I tried three cases (it seems
aftereffects only exports videos with alpha channels compressed with
TIFF, TARGA, and PNG. So for fun I exported alpha channel videos and
tried to load them in Gem. Every single one loads fine according to the
pix_film and pix_movie output, BUT only shows a green square in the
render. Looking further I realized that my Gem 090 does not load any
quicktime movies compressed with TARGA, TIFF or PNG.

Could someone give this a try on thier OSX machines? I did not try all
the codecs, but I know DV, cinepack, photojpeg and sorenson certainly
work. I think I reported the same trouble with the animation codec a
while back.

I don't care much for Gem supporting all codecs personally, but it would
be very nice If we have one codec on OSX that supported alpha channels
working (TARGA, TIFF or PNG) the latter two being my preference.

This also brings up the issue of "similar" functionality working on all
platforms. In theory we should be able to load alpha channels from TIFF
images on all platforms, as well as loading Quicktime movies using the
TIFF codec with alpha channels. :)

Thank you Gem developers!!!

b.



Thomas Ouellet Fredericks wrote:
> I can correct most of the stuff but I do not understand the error :
>
> MPEG3: unsupported!
>
> I made the mvoies with quicktime pro 6.3. They are actually TGA image
> sequences, millions+ of colors. What alpha format does quiktime for
> linux  support?
>
> The movies are read with [pix_movie] followed by an [alpha] box.
>
> Tom
>
>
> On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:13:44 +0100, Frank Barknecht <fbar at footils.org> wrote:
>
>>Hallo Thomas,
>>Thomas Ouellet Fredericks hat gesagt: // Thomas Ouellet Fredericks wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 23:29:09 +0100, Frank Barknecht <fbar at footils.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>Krzysztof Czaja hat gesagt: // Krzysztof Czaja wrote:
>>>
>>>Could you please send me a print-out of the errors, I will correct the patch.
>>
>>I attached all error messages until the Gem window appears. I did look
>>around a bit in your patch already, but I could find dashed objects.
>>However I surely haven looked in every patch yet. ;)
>>
>>Ciao
>>--
>> Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__
>>
>>          _ __latest track: "scans" _ http://footils.org/cms/show/41
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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