(solved) Transparent video with Polyspatial Video Component?

Unity Engine
, ,
1

EDIT: Leaving here for posterity, but the problem ended up being the HEVC video wasn’t rendered with transparency, otherwise transparent video works great with the PS component / native rendering!

// For exporting transparent from After Effects:
    // Add PNG files to a composition as a "PNG sequence"
    // Go to File>Export>Add to render Queue
    // Click on "Lossless"
    // Format Options>Video>Video Codec> Pro Res 4444
    // Channels > RGB + Alpha
    // click OK and then Render
    // In finder right click the file, Encode Selected Video Files > HEVC 2160p > Preserve Transparency ( https://larryjordan.com/articles/include-transparency-alpha-channels-in-hevc-video/ )

Hi folks,

The PS Video Component currently seems limited to .m4v, perhaps not by design. This precludes videos with alpha that would otherwise work (say, MOVs).

This might be a bug - the M4V suffix seems hardcoded somewhere - but before diving deeper, I wanted to check in and see whether this is even worth pursuing. My intuition is that similar to composition layers, any natively rendered video will not play well when composited with alpha over engine-rendered pixels. Is that the case? Or should transparent video work?

(Part of the challenge is - as far as I can tell the PS Video Component doesn’t let you work with a custom SG material, so I can’t even key-out the black background at runtime, which I’d otherwise do)

1 Like
2

I know this is solved, but FWIW it is possible to use the built-in Unity VideoPlayer now and have a custom material displaying it, though last time I tried it was strangely dark on device/simulator… but I didn’t dive deep enough into debugging it.

3

Thanks - at least in our experience performance and quality degraded significantly when not rendering natively (although the docs do a good job of presenting the pros and cons)

4

Good to know, thanks. I assumed that the overhead would just be that of a single texture blit but maybe it’s worse than I thought.

5

Thanks! Very interesting. Can I ask you the video format you ended up using?

6

sure thing - HEVC with alpha.