I tried to use an avi raw file as texture but all I got was a blank object. Can someone please summarize what it needs? (file format/settings in blender)
Thanks people.
I’m taking you did texture- Image.
Then load the image in the dialog box.
On the right of the screen you need to set how many frames and the incrementer, which should probably stay at 1.
Beyond that, you have to play with the different settings for the particular clip you are using.
And make sure the texture is set to affect the color channel.
Also make sure you turn on the “Movie” button in the Image texture panel.
What if you dont know how many frames there are?
If it’s an avi and you are in the US, then 30 frames per second.
If you are European they shoot at 25 frames per second.
Most clips are even seconds.
I use Premiere or VT for most of my editing. Not sure what open source there is that would give you exact # of frames, but it shouldn’t be that difficult. Just render the last few frames to make sure it looks right.
I think blender will hold the last image by default if you set the length longer than the video, so you would need to render the last couple frames to make sure you’re not holding on the final one.
I may be wrong on the last part. Someone correct me if I am.
One more tip if you don’t already do it. When making the plane or face for video mapping, select it and hit the ‘n’ key. You can then size your plane at the correct size for your picture ratio.
Usually that will be 4 units wide by 3 units tall. Widescreen is 16 units wide by 9 units tall. Extrapolate those to any numbers you want, but the picture will look much better if you keep those ratios.
Also, missed that part.
The incrementer tells how many frames to use. 1 goes 1 frame at a time through the video. 2 would skip a frame between each one rendered. Etc. It would work best if you wanted to time lapse footage, like say compress and hours worth into a minute. I’m sure you’ve seen stuff like that before on Discovery where the flowers grow really quickly, or on the home design shows when they’re running around really fast.
What if you dont know how many frames there are?
Click the left-facing arrowhead button next to Frames: to use all the frames in an .avi.
thanks all 
Someone know how to UVmap a mesh with a video ?
mapping video on to a realtime mesh is not possible. Heck, getting any texture to show up in non-realtime mode isn’t possible either so there. 
That said, I think you can sort of fake “video” by having a single texture that tiles and setting the tile size in the UV texture editor. I haven’t tried this myself yet but I have seen .blend files where some textures in the background were switching…
You can also just drop the avi file in to the video sequence editor. It will tell you how many frames are in it.
Kind of off topic but one other cool use for the video sequence editor is finding out how many frames are in a sound file. You want to make sure the playback frame rate is set to what you want. (In my case it’s 24fps for film speed) Bring in the sound and place it in the video sequence editor. It will tell you how many frames long the sound will play according to the currently set playback speed.
You can’t bring the sound in and expect the number of frames to change by switching the playback speed afterwards. I think it generates that number only once when the sound is brought in.
phong.
hi, how this post is getting a bit off topic i will make my question also, about the discovery effect, is there a way to setup render to jump some frames? i could do this manually but would save me a lot of render time if i could set it on the fly, thanks in advance, im am planning to use this effect in an animation that i am making.
Never tried it but you should be able to use a cmd line argument with Startframe; Endframe; Startframe; Endframe.
http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlII/a8314.html
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