Blender animation to flash, with transparency!

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Hello peps! Bit of a difficult one.

I wanted to know if it’s possible to make a flash video in Blender.

More importantly! Can you make a video that has transparent alpha in it.

So for example:

I create a 3d animation, render it on a green background, somehow turn the green into transparent.

Then take the image sequences and make them into a flash file for import into Adobe flash.

I know this can be done with After Effects, but it’s expensive and I wanted to know if Blender could manage this somehow.

Thanks in advance!

Dusty.

2

Hello Pep! :wink:

You can make an FLV with a transparent background but you might need something else to do it, rather than just Blender.

Alternatively you can export an image sequence of PNGs which is a little heavy but still works?!?

3

To use transparent video in flash, you have to encode the FLV file with the VP6On codec and enable the alpha layer. Then you have transparent video in flash! The default FLV codec is sorenson spark and it does not supoprt an alpha channel. Also, when you choose VP6on codec, you are locked into flash player 8.0 or greater. This feature was not available in player 7.0 or less.

4

That’s cool, I’ll be using this with the Flash CS4, so that should be fine.

So, could I use the sequence editor and nodes on a series of already made images? Rather than 3D renders?

What I mean is, say a make a film on green screen, use something to make the frames into seprate images, then use the node editor to turn the green on the image sequence into transparent, then finally turn the whole thing into a flash file with transarency?

EDIT:
How rude of me, THANK YOU for the replies BTW! :wink:

EDIT EDIT:
Atom, do you have a link? I googled VP6On codec and nothing came up.

5

My bad, try On2 VP6.

6

Ah! you have to pay for that, well if there is no open source or GNU alternative, then I guess this could save me a buck or two.

Ok then, in that vien, Does anyone know of a cheap video editor that exports to flash with alpha transparent, other than After Effects?

7

OK! Never mind!

Blender can render the background to transparent and if I make a series of PNG files, apparently Flash will load them as a sequence. GREAT! :slight_smile:

8

You don’t have to pay for it, it comes with flash.

If your PNG sequence is small, you can get away with importing an image sequence to the timeline, but without a pre-loader, you will get a serious hang as the movie loads (depending upon file size). Playing a sequence as an FLV will give you better performance. (But it won’t look as good). Take your pick?