I was unable to find right format or compression to put movie in background or object in C3. I use DV and Adobe Premire. If you know what video format specifications that would work in Carrara please post away! TY

Can you be more specific? The only format I've been able to get work right is .avi that is if you are referring to a movie as a texture. Brian brian@vizualds.com http://www.vizualds.com

720X480 with 29.97fps AVI would not work. I tried with three different DV programs. None of it that Carrara will be able to read. FYI it won't work with Scene background/backdrop and texture map for objects.

I just found out that Carrara are not familiar with some of the DV compressions. I used Cinepak Codec by Radius and it worked in Carrara

It might be better to use uncompressed video as a backdrop if you are trying to do an animation that includes an animated backdrop. That way, you won't get the same kind of degradation you would get from trying to recompress a video clip that has already been compressed once.

What software would you recommend that would not compress a video clip and readable in Carrara? Do you know of any software that would change the video image into sketch or paint type art video? You know the "Sketch Designer" in Poser, I need something better than that. Photoshop is excellent in converting image into brush image, I wish there is one for video too.

Now that you mention it, any video clip you possess is (most likely) already compressed, so you would be wasting alot of HD space if you converted it to uncompressed video using Quicktime Pro, for example. Any download from a website or warez group, any clip from a VCD or DVD, any clip from a video camera; all of those things are compressed.

So it's either a question of using uncompressed video generated by a 3D software like Poser or Carrara, or using some standard compression format. If Carrara can handle Cinepak, maybe it can handle mpeg-1 (VCD), mpeg-2 (DVD) or typical warez clips (DivX 5.x). If not, we have to pressure Eovia to get up to speed on the most common formats.

If Photoshop has a good brush filter you like, then ask in the Photoshop forum for a batch technique to apply an action to a folder full of tiff images which represent the individual frames of your clip. These tiff images can then be recombined back into the video clip using Quicktime Pro or other video editors.

So there are no such software that would download and save uncompressed clips directly from digital video camera? I am very picky on video image quality. I have Photoshop 6.5/Premiere 6.0. The Photoshop plugins is supposed to work in Premiere's plugins directory. Adobe published that in knowledge base that it would only work on older version of windows 98 and Millennium. The video collection I bought was only a year old. (sigh)