Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with overlay

On screen grid in Windows?

n3rt — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:52:35 -0800

Is there a Windows utility that will display an on-screen grid over all other applications with definable sizes? I use Fast Stone Capture's ruler utility all the time as a designer, but a grid would be immensely useful.

There's no plate, but these strange dents that appear to come up in the shape of numbers and letters...

theichibun — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:01:10 -0800

Why are license plates painted over on car commercials? I've wondered about this for a while, and finally thought to ask. I've searched here and Google, and the closest I could find was information about hiding license plates on cars that are actually out in the world.

I want to know specifically about painting over the license plate with a solid color that I've seen on many car commercials.

It's not like it does a wonderful job of hiding the plate numbers. If I wanted it bad enough I could figure it out. And I'm assuming that if you're driving on a closed course (as many of the commercials claim in their legal fine print), you don't need a plate.

It just seems to me that taking the plate off and filming would be a lot less work than either editing the shots to add that color overlay or taking off the plate and wrapping something of a solid color around it and putting it back on.

Best (fastest, simplest) MAC-capable software for adding a logo to a photo and printing borderless.

jcdill — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:18:26 -0800

I need the best (fastest, simplest) MAC-capable software for adding a logo to a photo and printing borderless. I'm having problems with Photoshop and Lightroom (not printing borderless) and I can't add a logo with iPhoto. I'm using a MacBook Pro, OS X 10.5, printing to a Canon Pixma iP1800 printer. For some reason (I've searched and asked on several Adobe forums but no help so far) I can't get either Photoshop or Lightroom to print BORDERLESS 4x6s with this printer. iPhoto prints borderless, but I can't overlay a logo using iPhoto. The "easy print" software that comes on the Canon CD also prints borderless, but it's stupid, cumbersome, and slow to use, and again I can't overlay a logo. Switching applications (e.g. add the logo in Photoshop, print from iPhoto) isn't going to work - I need a MUCH FASTER workflow for this project. I can't make it go faster by batch processing - these will be individual shots, individually printed, one after the other, for 4 hours tomorrow afternoon from 4-8 pm. Thanks!

How to overlay a graphic onto one frame of MPEG-2 video

Crabby Appleton — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:14:48 -0800

Is there a video editing tool that can overlay a graphic onto a single frame of an MPEG-2 video? I need to take a graphic (still picture) and overlay it onto the first frame of an existing MPEG-2 video (or just graft it on as the first frame of the video, if that's significantly easier). The graphic has not been generated yet, so the format can be pretty flexible, although I imagine it would be a .gif or .bmp, or something similar.

I'd be amazed if there's not some video editor that can "just do it". But I don't know which editor(s) and I need to do it very soon. I'd prefer something free that runs on MS Windows, but don't hesitate to mention commercial software as well. If there's a simple Linux command-line program that would do it, I could probably use it. If you can tell me how to do it step-by-step for the software you recommend, I'd appreciate that, too. (I could probably figure it out eventually, but time is of the essence.)