What is Alpha Channel?

[Gil T Pleasure]

I'm want to create weatherman style effects using VideoStudio 7. I assume VS7 can do the trick since the manual mentions about this:

To make Overlay clips with transparent backgrounds, you can create a 32-bit alpha channel AVI or Image file with an alpha channel.

My quesiton is, what is an alpha channel and how do I create a 32-bit alpha channel AVI?

TIA.

[racer-x]

An Alpha channel is a transparent layer. Formats that suport Alpha channels include psd, tiff, tga and probably more. If you make an image with a transparent layer like a Title in Photoshop and save it as a psd, you can set the transparency as White Alpha Matte in your video editor and you'll only see the Opaque image overlayed on your video.

I don't use VS7, so I don't know what it will support. If you want to make say a picture in picture, you put a clip over your main video, then shrink the size. This will make an Alpha channel around the video clip you just shrunk. You can set the transparency to the Alpha channel and it will make the shrunken video visible over the main video.

I hope VS7 handles Alpha channels better than Video Studio Pro 6.5 did.

[Specialist]

The 32-bit UNCOMPRESSED overlay video can be exported from ULEAD COOL 3D PRODUCTION STUDIO...

http://www.ulead.com/c3ds/features.htm

... for use in Ulead VideoStudio 7.0.

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

I'm want to create weatherman style effects using VideoStudio 7. I assume VS7 can do the trick since the manual mentions about this:

To make Overlay clips with transparent backgrounds, you can create a 32-bit alpha channel AVI or Image file with an alpha channel.

My quesiton is, what is an alpha channel and how do I create a 32-bit alpha channel AVI?

TIA.