post production effect (not After Effects)

[T***@adobeforums.com]

This is not directly related to Premier Pro, but I am in great need of direction. I have been asked to develop an interactive training DVD to train Air Attack Supervisors in Wildland Firefighting. I have video of retardant drops shot from the lead plane. I am looking for a way to "draw" over the video during a class...like you would see in Monday Night Football with the yellow "pen". What software/hardware is needed to accomplish this?...or is it even possible?

Thank you ahead of time for sharing your knowledge and taking the time to help me.

TaiLese

[P***@adobeforums.com]

AE or Combustion or Boris Red. Why not AE?

[K***@adobeforums.com]

What you are trying to achieve can be considered a form of rotoscoping, and depending on the complexity of the drawing can be done with or without After Effects. If your lines are not complex and do not require lots of movement and curves, you could actually create lines in Photoshop and export with a transperent background. Then add transitions and movement to the lines in PPro. This should give you some flexibility but not as much as After Effects, which is designed for tasks like this.

[B***@adobeforums.com]

I think there may be confusion here. will boris, ae, etc allow
someone to do a realtime, interactive drawing over the screen
during playback? sounds like you want a device that will plug
in between your dvd or video tape player and the projector
rather than vfx software.

[K***@adobeforums.com]

After Effects, Premiere, etc, won't be able to do this in real time as part of a presentation. What you want is known as a "telestrator" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telestrator>, and I wouldn't expect one to be cheap. Of course, it's possible you could find a software version but a quick scan of Google hasn't brought much to light so far. You might be able to fudge it with video embedded as part of a PowerPoint display, but the functionality's kind of limited.

[D***@adobeforums.com]

I suspect that it would be possible to achieve this using the latest version of Macromedia Flash, where video can be now used as a layer and other layers placed on top. The top layer could be a drawing surface under mouse/tablet control.

To generate such a combination you would need someone with reasonable ActionScript skills.

Ask on a Flash forum.