Anyone have experience inserting vector animation over their live-action video, or know how to do it? I want to capture from miniDV and output to DVD (not the web).

If not, anyone in Austin know Bob Sabiston? :)

WHat exactly are you trying to do with the vector graphics?

DV is a raster medium, so no matter what you do, you are ultimately stuck in 1 fixed rez. I find after effects is much faster to work with than flash, and can do practically the same thing if it is going to a video piece. This is of course in combination with illustrator.

any specific questions?

Zac

If all you're looking to do is comp vector and DV for non-web use, you do NOT want to go anywhere near Flash. Zac's right, the best job for this would be a compositor app like After Effects or Commotion.

You could do it in some NLEs, such as Premiere, but it's more difficult and you're somewhat limited.

I've only tried it once with some success. I used it for a particular text animation that I didn't feel like recreating. It was OK for what I was doing. Not sure how a more complex animation might look. I just exported the FLASH animation as an avi file with a green background and then keyed out the background.

There are a variety of ways to export a Flash movie, including as an Illustrator, eps or png sequence. Might be worth trying to see which works best.

I use a combination of Illustrator, Flash, *and* After Effects to do these clips:

http://www.keithloh.com/video/umbrella/index.html

The encode is a bit poor but you'll get the idea.

However, I can't really speak to the resolution factor. I try to make all my initial source files (Illustrator) in higher than screen DPI (I'm past that phase so I forget what PPI exactly). After I do the animation in Flash I throw it back into AfterEffects to cut into the live action.

Keith, that looked very cool.

By the way just to be annoying, all of what you did IS possible with just illustrator and after effects, you would simply just use masks to draw the edges or stroke your objects, much much much faster than tweening.

But hey, it looked cool!

Zac

<<<-- Originally posted by Keith Loh :

http://www.keithloh.com/video/umbrella/index.html

-->>>

This is very close to what I want to do, so it looks like I'll be investing in more Adobe products in the future. I had never considered After Effects for animation, so thanks to all that suggested it.

All in After Effects eh? To tell you the truth, I don't really like Flash that much so if I will explore your method in After Effects to see if it will speed that up in the future.

This isn't like what Keith has done... it's more of a straight vectorizing of existing video for a fun animation effect.

It's unfinished, but seeing as how I haven't gotten back into it in a while, I guess I'm done with it. :P

http://www.theseventhlevel.net

I used a tool called Flix Pro to do it. It's a tool that not only converts your video into flash-video format that allows you to show video without the user needing a plugin (other than flash), but it also allows you to convert your video into vector animation. Kinda neat stuff:

http://www.wildform.com/flix

The tool can do more detail than what I preserved... I just personally liked the less-detail approach.

damn, thats pretty awesome. lol...maybe I should try it!?

I'm really pissed off at Flix Pro right now. The original version worked ok. Then I paid to upgrade and the new version was slighly better but was trickier to set up. A month or so ago I was offered a free upgrade to whatever version and now I can't get it to encode at all. When I get some time I will go to their forum and try to figure out what's wrong.