We're working on a X3D6 and would like to make it easier to use X3D for creating movie captions. I know there are traditional blue-screen (or green screen) methods that work now, but these methods are severely limited and rather technical.

Does anyone have any suggestions for ways in which we can easily make it easier to create animated 3D captions to movie files?

One thought - that may or may not be easy - is that we do the work ourselves and import a movie one frame a at time and, composite the animation on the frames and export the movie again. This would have the advantage that we can have properly anti-aliased edges, real soft shadows etc. But this method has complex issues about movie export format control and the fact it might be re-compressing the movie. But it would at least be very easy for the user - just select the movie you want the animated caption applied to and press 'go' and that would be it, you'd have a finished movie with the caption added.

Another possibility is that we generate a separate animated movie, but using alpha-channel frames. I have no idea whether such a thing exists, but I have seen oblique references to movie formats that are 32 bits-per-pixel where 8 bits is alpha-channel. It would be easy for us to write such formats (in effect it's just a sequence of alpha PNGs). This might be useful if movie editors out there can composite one alpha movie on top of another. but I have no idea whether such things are common-place or not.

As you can tell I'm a newbie when it comes to movie editing and formats etc. Just trying to understand ways in which we can make this area easier. Strikes me there would be demand for a nice and easy, low cost, way of adding animated 3D captions onto movies.