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Spent yesterday working on some logo/branding videos for my club. I made a video texture of the paint splatters, but it was extremely large 2560 x 2560px. The original video was about 1min and even compressed as Apple's Intermediate Codec (which is MPEG2-based constant bitrate, I believe) the video file is over 8GB.... That's just the *texture* I wanted to use in Carrara.
 
So I am more or less interpretting some ideas from our in-house decor, some of our print work this month has this paint splatter worked into our logo (which is the cherry symbol). I had a vague idea that I wanted our logo floating over a backdrop and it would all have the paint splatter texture on it, but I wasn't exactly sure what would be the best way to do it. The texture itself was so large and unweildy that I didn't necessarily want to prep multiple versions - okay, I was feeling lazy and wanted to do it all in Carrara.... I knew the texture would scale differently on my logo (created from a custom font, so the symbol you are seeing is actually a Carrara text object) than the plane behind it. This was what I was trying to avoid, so laziness got me to experiment a little....

I had the idea I would use the texture as a light gel. This sort of worked, certainly the plane and logo had the same scale of texture on it, but I quickly discovered I would need a better drop shadow to distinguish the logo. I was pretty happy to see that such a huge video texture could be loaded as a light gel though. A lot of my job is done with video projectors, and I've always wanted to create some models that represent my real life visuals to create my work on 3D virtual sets, props, test renders, pre-viz, etc

Anyhoo, I had to put the video into the shader room which worked fine. Yadayada a few tests later I ended up using SHADER OPS RealUV to scale a second version of the shader for the logo. Had some issues with pixelating though, so I am not sure if that was the plugin or if I was just misjudging my scale for the second shader (you can see there isn't much scale, some blops of paint are large, some very small).... 

I'm using a new computer now, a Mac Pro (the black cylinder) but I haven't been able to offord the RAM for it . However, even underpowered it has been remarkable at handling large scale videos like my paint splatter texture... What I wasn't sure of is whether Carrara would be up for it.... I was trying to render out HD - and here was my mistake.

Going against my own advice I thought I would try to render to Apple Intermediate Codec (the one I said above is MPEG2). This turned out to be a disaster. After about 10frames, Carrara puttered to a halt, the 32bit QT thing also puttered to a halt, I lost all control of the computer, and wasn't even able to force quit as the computer was so tied up with 2 ginormous AIC files at once.... After several reboots it just wasn't gonna happen.

So I streamlined my original texture video into a PNG seq (and trimmed it to just a few seconds longer than my animation). Also eventually had to render to PNG sequence (thus avoiding the 32bit QT thing).... Carrara cranked through this very easily. My video uses the "motion camera" scene files here on Cafe Downloads. Once I stopped being stubborn about my laziness with the video files, and just accepted the fact that PNG sequence was an easier workload, everything was fine.