Hi - It’s been awhile since I have fired up Combustion 4 - Mac. I am looking for a solution for something I was told to try in Photoshop and it looked awful. I have a 6 second small QuickTime movie featuring a cow in the front moving from right to left. The deliverable is an FLV with alpha. They need the solo cow with alpha so it can be keyed in Flash.

I imported the footage, went to Operators - Mask - Draw Mask and used the Bezier Mask tool with Animate on. I advance each frame and was tweaking the mask to feature my solo cow. When I open it up now, I can’t seem to find the bezier points to continue.

This may be a 3 part question:
1: - Is using a mask like this a good solution?
2: - How do I get those bezier points to display again?
3: If I successfully mask the image and render the file, how do I export this allowing me to create an FLV with Alpha?

Any suggestions or alternate approaches are greatly appreciated. Please keep them simple, as I am pretty new to this fairly old version of Combustion.

Thanks in advance.

- shorescores

Anybody?

I know it’s been less than 24 hours, but my back is to the wall with my client waiting.

Fingers crossed somebody will come through!

Thanks.

- shorescores

Thanks for the reply. I read the article and it seems like the author is using masking techniques to remove unwanted objects. I thought I was doing the same thing? If not, can you please tell me specifically what technique and tools I should use in Combustion?

Thanks.

- shorescores

I agree with Rayk, however-

The flash exporter is part of the Paint operator.. I’m not sure you can use it to export masked footage.. I think it is just for vector..

You’ll have to render to some format and convert to flash w/ alpha..

-Matthew

Rayk & Matthew - Thanks so much for the feedback. I appreciate it!

- shorescores