transparent background

[Bozobrain2]

Has anyone successfully created an animated character with a transparent background. And one that will play on a web page.

[John T Smith]

Please post the name of the program you use so a Moderator may move this message to that forum

-A program would be Photoshop or Dreamweaver or Muse or Premiere Pro or ???

[Bozobrain2]

I am using Ch  which is Adobe Character Animator CC.

All works well until the export to web friendly format for playing.

[alank99101739]

You can export to a range of formats using Adobe Media Encoder. What I don’t know is whether you can create an animated GIF (or similar) with transparency. There are other encoders you can purchase. So I don’t know which encoder to use, but I wrote up a blog post on how to use a different encoder that may help a bit: https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/07/08/exporting-adobe-character-animator-videos-with-transparency/  - it just won’t tell you the right encoder for what you want to achieve.

[Bozobrain2]

Thanks for the input. I actually used their encoder with Animate as the choice under Quicktime. Unfortunately it still ignores the background and converts to solid color.

I even tried setting a green screen of the initial Photoshop file and then using the Premier pro to clear the greenscreen with chromakey.

However unable to get a transparent file in background. Tried gif  and png..This does not bode well for using video instead of the animated character.

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

In the blog post above, I mention you can filter presets using "alpha" (which is the technical term for transparency). On Windows, the only one I know of supported is QuickTime / GoPro CineForm RGB-12 bit with alpha. This will generate a video file with transparency. On Windows, that is the only encoder I know of that will generate transparencies.

There are other encoders you can get. I tried the WebP encoder, but its open source and transparency support is broken at present.

But if you want a widely support web standard format with transparency support, it might be a matter of first working out that format. E.g. PNG has transparency, but its only still images. MP4 has video, but not transparency. Etc. So what is the right format to use? Once you have that decided, I think you can search for an encoder that can generate that format.