Posted by RP on 08/04/06 03:20

Well, that didn't work out as a solution because of the variability of
my four quadrants. Each one has still images of varying sizes that are
animated with keyframes and changing size during the clip, so they have
widely differing sizes. That's why I wanted the black bars separating
the screen into four bounded areas, to provide a clean black border
around each quadrant. That's also why cropping won't work, if you can
imagine the work that would be required to crop each changing quadrant
to a fixed size.

That's why I focused on masking or just putting black overlay graphic
on top of the images, it seems like the most efficient way to do what
I'm looking for. Unfortunately, the Tracking Mask Key, which is the
best way to do directly what I'm trying to do, is buggy and doesn't
work. The other good solution (actually, it would be the best and
easiest solution) is to just make a graphic that is 720x480 with black
bars and 4 holes for each quadrant and then just lay that on top of the
whole production. This is what I've been trying to do, and
unfortunately it doesn't produce good results because when I move the
video from my computer to the TV monitor playing a DVD, the "black"
turns into very grey gray. Hence my question: how can I generate true
Black? Can I do it in PhotoShop? Even when I try it there with -255
brightness, 0,0,0 RGB value, when it gets displayed from a DVD onto a
TV monitor, it turns out very gray, not at all black.

Any other ideas?

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