Hi All,
I bought a animated video title package off Envato Elements for my Youtube channel and my friend has successfully customised and rendered these in After Effects.
He sent me the files but when I download these onto a separate video track on Shotcut and play them they don’t have a transparent background and therefore I can’t overlay them on my main video as title plays but with a black background.
Any ideas? Is there a setting? Is it a compatibility issue? I would have thought you could make your own titles externally and download.
I don’t find the inhouse Shotcut titles very exciting and they are not animated.
I’m told the animated video title I’m using is definitely transparent but I’m unsure of the procedure to load on Shotcut as it’s not loading the usual way.
I have never seen H.264/AVC (what you show) with an alpha channel, and I am not certain that is even technically possible. Even if it were, I would be surprised if it works with our decoder. Certainly our H.264 encoder - x264 - does not support it.
If it was rendered in After Effects and is transparent I would have expected it to be using Quicktime Animation Compression in a Quicktime container (.mov).
Thanks, yes I do realise in this screenshot the below track is empty but the title is still not transparent when the below track was filled.
What is the mediainfo link before I consider downloading and what will it show me?
Mediainfo lists all the metadata for the video. When you showed the screenshots of the “properties” in Shotcut, it didn’t show all the properties (metadata) as you have to scroll the panel showing the data. Mediainfo gives the whole information.
However, as Dan pointed out, from the properties he could see it looks as if your video is not transparent, or if it is there is no way it can be imported as a tranparent video into Shotcut.
I have just seen this animated title load successfully as a transparent animated title on my friends (the guy who made the title) after effects video editing software. No problem looks good.
So now I know it is transparent and that it works.
So now it’s probably a case that,
The file is not compatible with Shotcut… or
I’m downloading and inserting it wrong on Shotcut
To the best of my knowledge (I’m a newbie here and with Shotcut) I would upload the title and drag it in on a separate video track as per usual and then adjust the size etc
I did see some video about clicking on ‘open other’ > ‘colour’ > and click on ok to select transparent but I’m not sure this is what I’m supposed to do in this case.
This is only to create a transparent clip that for example you might want to put text onto. So you see the text floating on top of the clip in the track(s) below.
If you create a transparent video in After Effects, which your friend apparently did, he would have chosen “Quicktime Animation” in the “compression type” dialogue and the file should have been saved in a Quicktime container (.mov file). From your screenshot of the properties the video is shown as an .mp4 file, which as Dan says is not compatible for a transparent video input to Shotcut.
The H.264 specification does not support alpha channel. The video shown in the screenshot above most definitely does not have transparency data in it. As Elusien said, transparent animations are typically saved as QuickTime Animation or ProRes 4444 in a MOV container. Shotcut supports both.
It may be possible to chroma key the black, but the filter would need a little extra tolerance given since H.264 compression does not produce perfectly flat blacks. Compression artefacts would need to be accounted for.
The confusion is probably coming from Envato. Here’s a sample product download page on their site. They offer two versions of each asset: An MP4 version that does not have transparency, and a QuickTime PNG+Alpha version that does have transparency. The screenshot above may be using the MP4 version, which is not transparent.
Thanks very much everyone. I have relayed this info to my friend who rendered the animated titles as some of it is above my understanding he’s going to have another try at it . I’ll let you all know how I get on when I get the new titles.
Thanks Jonray. Yes I’ve watched a video on this but I’ve never done this before. Not sure if it would also take out some of the black within the itself ?
