Transparent AVI in Muvizu in 4 easy steps

So I've been playing around with transparent AVI files in Muvizu recently. They are actually really useful for making videos with as you can do all sorts of neat tricks with them that would be impossible otherwise. There's a couple of videos that have been made already using this tip, check them out here.

I've made a tutorial video to take you through the process of making an AVI with transparency and importing it into Muvizu. All you need to do is -

Step 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BUjgTuREI0&t=0m55s
Configure Muvizu. You need to make sure Muvizu 3D animation software is not running and then go to c:\program files\muvizu\muvizugame\config and open the file DefaultGame.ini and change the tag bStripVideoAlpha to false.

Step 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BUjgTuREI0&t=2m40s
Image editor and Virtual Dub. Make sure that you have an image editor that will allow you to save transparency within a PNG file. Microsoft paint will not allow you to save the transparency so you will need something like GIMP (http://www.gimp.org) or Adobe Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com). Then you will need to have the latest experimental version of Virtual Dub (http://www.virtualdub.org) this is version 1.10.0, either of the 32bit and 64bit versions will work fine.


Step 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BUjgTuREI0&t=4m01s
Create your transparent video frames. In this example we take a screen shot of the "Axe in the head" character attachment and using Photoshop generate 24 frames of this axe spinning around 360 degrees.

Step 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BUjgTuREI0&t=10m43s
Import your video frames into Virtual Dub and then configure Virtual Dub to output the transparency within the AVI. To do this you will need to go to the Video - Colour depth option and make sure that "Decompression format" is on "Autoselect" and that "Output format to compressor/display" is on "Same as decompression format". Then you need to ensure that Virtual Dub is using the "(Uncompressed RGB/YCbCr)" codec. That's it. Save your file as an AVI and import it in to Muvizu.

There are other things you can do with this technique. In my example I've basically stop motioned the axe spinning around however, you can use other existing video - of a character walking about, for example - and using a mask or other tools remove the background to import just the characters movement. You could even film yourself on a green screen background and chroma key out the background to leave only yourself in the video to be imported, and then interact with a Muvizu character.

Hopefully this tutorial is clear and easy to follow and the technique is useful to you!