Newbie to Blender: Need to get a green-screen setup going.

Support Compositing and Post Processing
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I’m looking for a series of tutorials that will help me go from “Total blender newbie” to “competent enough to get this done.”

I’m literally sitting here with my mouth agape not knowing even a fraction of what Blender can do.

What I need is a way to get a green-screen setup going as well as positioning some “bugs” so that I can keep the branding that I’ve made.

I’ll outline what I’d do if I was using After-effects (which is what I would use but I only have the educational license for those from college so I can’t risk running afoul of the licensing agreement to use this for a product that I hope to sell.)

I have footage of a 3D asset that’s animated and rendered out with a nice lighting setup. I have an uncompressed AVI at full HD (yes, I already know that’s a resource hog… I can deal with that.) I can also render out a targa-sequence if Blender will support that (so far I haven’t found much that suggests it does support targa-sequences.) This I suspect I’d use the “Video Sequence Editor” for.

I also have some watermarks/bugs to add in there… And some logos. But they’re made in such a way (right now) that they’re just the logo and very little empty space. So, I need to figure out how to position them (and I’d also like to animate them moving… ideally, the sequence I would like to have is having the logic fade in full screen and centered… The title is then revealed and the logo pans to the bottom left.) I have the inkling that the clip editor is what I’d use as well as the node editor.

Thing is… I’m a total newbie to Blender (which I’m sure you get a fair amount around here.) So, not only am I flabbergasted at the program I’m also really unsure what I can even do or how to go about doing it.

So, the question is… Are there any tutorials you can point me in the direction of that will help me get up to speed with the compositing toolset of Blender? And I do hope you can forgive me asking this because I’ve looked around and a good many of them seem to be with the assumption that one already has a basic understanding of Blender. I’m coming in pretty much blind (though I understand a bit about the general process… so, there’s that.)

So, compositing in Blender for the total newbie… Also, Targa-sequences (yes/no?)

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Thank you! This will certainly help (even though in the mean while I learned with the help of Oliver Villar how to do a greenscreen process in the node editor) and knowing how to use targa-sequences will certainly help (helps me avoid having to green-screen/composite each clip individually.)

And yeah, I have to admit that the request for it being as newbie-friendly as possible was also a bit of a thing… To be fair I’m coming from Max/After-effects and the UI was just so mystifying to me… It took about two hours to figure out how to even get to the menu to save the files. (not saying it’s bad… just very different from what I’m used to.)

I’m also going to see about adding in that tool you linked to. Thank you again!

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You should have seen the old interface. Now that was mystifying! I think the new one is really nice.

ETA: Here’s an example of it. Buttons crammed into whatever space was available, and most of the labels are abbreviated so it’s tough to tell what each button does.
http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/thumb/9/98/Interface.fr.png/500px-Interface.fr.png

Steve S

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Yeah, that’s a lot like the UI that I remember seeing when I first tried it… And ran screaming right back to Max. (So, yeah, I do see how it is improved a lot.)

That said, I do find it a little daunting because I really only need it for compositing and a lot of the tutorials geared to learning have a 3D bent to them. Not that I’m really complaining too much but maybe if the people that do tutorials are listening, maybe try making a series that goes into using it for one or two specific things that it can do? I’m going to admit it, what I’ve learned so far is encouraging and does make me understand why it’s garnered such a massive following… But that learning curve… Yeesh!