How to render a video without a background?

[xX-Towrd01-Xx]

I'm trying to make some death counter overlays for a project i'm working on for my youtube channel for a minecraft project. But i don't know how to render without having to have a black back ground there.

The death counters are the players minecraft characters walking on screen, then dieing with a number next to their avatar to show how many times they have died, like Haat Films do in their videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6DJq...feature=relmfu in this one @15.37 to see what im on about. I have made one of these animations albeit worse ones for each of the the characters taking part in my series. IS there any way that i can render them out of after effects without the black background so i can use them in Sony Vegas? or is it impossible and i may aswell just render the whole videos out in After effects, although Vegas is better for sound and long pieces of editing?

Any help would be much appreciated

Thanks

[AlanHK]

What you need is to define the background colour of your text as "transparent".
Look under "transparent", "transparency" in the documentation/help for Vegas.

[byteguy]

Duplicate post: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/345209-How-to-render-a-video-without-a-background

[Cornucopia]

Yeah, rarely, if EVER, do video apps actually NOT have data filling all the pixels in a layer (native compositing apps are an exception here), so in a sense you HAVE to put something there.

Like AlanHK said, you pick a (normally unused) color and designate that color as your transparency. Then it's the job of the next app (the one that uses this video in the foreground with something else in the background) to understand this "transparency" color and do the math to overay it correctly.

Scott

[poisondeathray]

I think he's asking how to render it out of AE for import into Vegas. I'll assume that you made the overlay assets in AE ok (If not, come back)

You need render it with alpha channel, make sure it's set to RGBA mode , not RGB mode (the "A" is for alpha channel or transparency) in the render settings

Formats that are commonly used and compatible with Vegas are animation codec (quicktime MOV), uncompressed RGBA (either AVI or MOV), lossless compression e.g. Lagarith AVI (in RGBA mode) or PNG or TIFF sequences with alpha

Although you could, I wouldn't use AE to do the whole thing. Like you said earlier, Vegas is much better for editing and audio. Only do those assets that you need to in AE , then export them for Vegas

[Cornucopia]

True, pdr, and that's what I would recommend also, but even then with an Alpha channel added, it still has SOME kind of info in the main pixels (hopefully BLACK).

It may not have been stressed enough: you have to select & generate an alpha channel 1st and then upon export choose a file format that FULLY supports alpha channels.

Scott

[xX-Towrd01-Xx]

yeah i did mean that, and i did it thanks i rendered it with RGB alpha channel, then when i imported it into vegas, i edited the properties of the clip and changed the type to Unmatted, or sommets like that, that removed the background, thanks guys

[Kaniay]

Yeah, rarely, if EVER, do video apps actually NOT have data filling all the pixels in a layer (native compositing apps are an exception here), so in a sense you HAVE to put something there.