Transparency - Snapshots - BMPs

ynotfish

Senior Contributor Location: N.S.W. Australia Joined: May 08, 2009 02:06 Messages: 9977 Offline

Solved by

Feb 01, 2015 14:50

This has got me stumped. Maybe someone can help.

I generally have my snapshot preferences set to .png, so I've never noticed this before... till I was posting here - https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/42460.page

So - I switched my snapshot preferences to .bmp. BMP files do support transparency, but I found an anomaly with snapshots using the .bmp format. By the way, I only switched to .BMP when I found that the .PNG snapshot wasn't accurate.

Snapshots of PiP Objects behave differently to snapshots of Titles

I'll try to explain in pictures...

No snapshot in .bmp format appears to contain transparency in PDR. Opening the snapshot in an image editor gives a different result.

If you can follow this, & you care, can you advise why it's the case? If you can't follow it, or don't care, don't worry.

Cheers - Tony


Filename	Title BMP.png	Download
Description
Filesize	140 Kbytes
Downloaded:	233 time(s)


Filename	PiP BMP.png	Download
Description
Filesize	271 Kbytes
Downloaded:	259 time(s)

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Feb 01. 2015 14:51

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tomasc

Senior Contributor Joined: Aug 25, 2011 12:33 Messages: 6464 Offline

Feb 02, 2015 01:03

You are right about bmp in PD. bmp file transparency is supported by some image editors. See this link: http://superuser.com/questions/386061/is-there-any-quality-difference-between-png-vs-bmp-image-formats . I recall at one time in the past that 24 bits has no transparency but 32 bit does. Can't find this info on the internet as windows properties report the snapshot as 32 bit. It's been a long time but I think dos bmp files did not support the alpha channel but windows supported bmp files with the alpha channel. See this link for user contradictory info and beliefs about bmp files: http://superuser.com/questions/53600/jpeg-vs-png-vs-bmp-vs-gif. No clear cut answer.

ynotfish

Senior Contributor Location: N.S.W. Australia Joined: May 08, 2009 02:06 Messages: 9977 Offline

Feb 02, 2015 05:12

Thanks for checking it out tomasc. Appreciated.

You're right - there's a mountain of contradictory (and confusing) information about BMP files out there.

You're also right about the 24-bit/32-bit thing. The same applies to .png files.

What I especially didn't get was that snapshots of titles behaved differently to snapshots of PiP Objects.

It's also kind of intriguing that the snapshots (bmp & png) aren't the same. They each pick up different information.

Cheers - Tony
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