Does anyone know an alternative to transparency blend urgent help needed!

Question

I have been trying to fade watermark for the past 3 days using transparency>blend in QT7.Does anyone know a reliable alternative as I have an inmminent deadline looming. details below :
When I try to create watermark in visual settings i.e transparency>blend, the watermark disappears when I close properties window and all that is left is a grey box. This even happens when I try to offset the watermark.
The very anoying problem is that occasionally I manage to carry out task successfully i.e blend watermark, using exactely the same commands!!
Come on apple, sort this problem out immediately!! Ther is no point in having a quality codec system like h264 if on the other hand there is an intermittent fault in visual settings and you cant carry out such a simple task. QT 7 is not near as robust as QT 6 for this purpose.
Does anyone have a work around? It would be really appreciated.
g4 1 ghz dual Mac OS X (10.3.9)
David M Brewer
Posts: 596
From: Denver, CO
Registered: 22-Jan-2006
Re: visual settings problems
Posted: 06-Aug-2006 08:25 in response to: Michael kelly1
Reply Email
Is the water make a png with a transparency? Use "Add To Selection And Scale."
Place the watermark on a higher level.
There nothing wrong with with Qt when placing a watermark.
g-4 1.2 gig Mac OS X (10.4.7) Quicktime 7.1.1-1.5 gigs of ram, 2-21" Sony monitors
Michael kelly1
Posts: 24
Registered: 27-Oct-2004
Re: visual settings problems
Posted: 06-Aug-2006 11:17 in response to: Michael kelly1
Reply Email
Yes watermark has transparency (png and gif files only used) and I use "add to selection and scale"
The problem is when I use blend slider I can see logo fading in QT file but when I exit movie properties the logo disappears and I am left with a grey box.I have repeated exercise with the same source logo file numerous times using exact same commands with only a 5% success rate.
I have increased level of gif video track as you suggested but when it went above 0 the watermark disappeared.

Answer 1

I can make something similar happen. It seems that changing from None to Blend to Straight Alpha does not always make the track change appearance. Other combinations can lead to it staying in other states.
The easy solution to that is to set the track ink to None, see that it did change, then set it to what you want, and see it change again, and then the effect should take ok.
I think there may be better performance if your watermark track uses straight alpha rather than blend. You could build more transparency into the PNG if you want it to have a blend effect. Or you could use Straight Alpha Blend. That will make the seethrough parts transparent, and the non seethrough parts will be blended.
There's another possible issue you may run into, which is that you may be exporting the combined watermark/video out to a new H264 track at low data rate. Depending on the nature of the video your logo make get ruined by the low data rate. Having the watermark in its own track (don't forget to do a Save As self contained, not just a Save) will give the best looking logo, but lesser performance. Exporting to a new movie will have a less good looking logo, but better performance.
iMac G5 1.8 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.5)