Which of the buildings was the hardest to mix with live video?

There were four LightWave animation sequences that I had to mix with live video and all the compositing was done in Aura. Three of the sequences had a locked off camera, but one had a moving camera, so that was definitely the hardest. I don't possess an automatic 3D motion tracker (like MatchMover, Boujou, etc.) because of the prohibitive cost of such software, even if things are cheaper now, so I got by with Camera Match by Worley Labs (I previously made 3D animations for Peugeot with Camera Match) and it works very well, it just takes some time.

What do you particularly like about the VT3?

Everything. I've never had a single problem with the VT3. The batch capture is almost perfect, a little bit offset, but it's always the same and always in the positive (DV, BetaSP, DigiBeta), on the other hand the Print To Tape function works perfectly (DigiBeta). The splines are superb.

If I had to pick one function above all, I would say that it's the ability to manipulate large format images (sometimes as large as 5000x5000) on the timeline - a real digital rostrum camera. I'm always amazed to see these animated images dissolve from one to another in real-time. I used about sixty large format images for this show. Before, I did this work in LightWave (because of the absence of splines in VT2), with all the problems that brings when I needed to make changes after any editing. Now, it just needs a couple of adjustments in the VT3 and you're ready to go again.

For the future, what would you like to see in the next Video Toaster?

Sound. I find that sound levels are always a bit low and we could really use a real VU meter. Today, I mix sound in the VT3, but everything that needs a bit of "sweetening" is done in SoundForge. I would like to see an equaliser and several other audio doodads built into the next Video Toaster. Several weeks ago on the NewTek VT forum, Bob Tasa talked about an audio plug-in, but since then nothing. I would also like the ability to cut audio monitoring on several tracks with a simple click (as you can do on a standard timeline, but I wouldn't give up the open timeline in TEd for a standard one!).

For the image side of things I would like to see the return of gamma control, but I think that will be back in shortly. An automatic white balance would be good as well. It would be good if subprojects worked like standard clips (with access to all the functions in the control tree) - it would allow, for example, prefiltering of large images in real-time. I'd like to export the EDL and to be able to print out the spreadsheet.

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What are you working on at the moment?

I'm going to soon be starting work on an animated film for la Cité des Sciences in Paris, and there are a whole bunch of other projects that it's a bit early to talk about right now.

Thanks for talking to us again François and good luck with your upcoming projects!