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Daniel Bayer · Nov 7, 2004, 04:56 AM

I have started shooting editing and producing small self promo films with all still digital images. Most files in sequence are up to 47MB per image at 16 bit when they come out of the oven.

I have been tweaking them down to 1.3 MB Jpegs to be pratical.

imovie and other little presentation apps are not even close to cutting it in regards to my needs so what do you think??

Will I be able to stuff 15 frames of quality stills in one second of footage with FCP??

I will of course shoot DV with stills too but right now, there are some insane things I am doing with stills.

??

dlefebvre · Nov 7, 2004, 10:02 AM

As much as I love FinalCut, that's the only type of work I don't like to do with it. When I work with mostly stills that I want to animate and all, I prefer After effect. I agree, it's not a great editing tool in itself, but it's hard to beat on anything else.

Daniel Bayer · Nov 7, 2004, 04:32 PM

Hmm....interesting (New to this somewhat).

How well does it integrate with audio files?

How many frames can you render per second?

Cheers,

d-b

dlefebvre · Nov 7, 2004, 05:06 PM

After Effects is a compositing an animation software not an editing package. It can play audio you can trim clips but it's not as friendly as FCP for this pupose. My sugestion would be to do a basic edit in FinalCut. Place your music, place your stills to the music and export it as a quicktime. Then use this clip as a reference to build your stills sequence in After Effects. If you're not familiar with After Effects, it might be easier to do it in FinalCut. Both software allow you to pan and scan, meaning you can pan around a picture that's bigger than the 720x480 pixels size of your DV sequence. I just prefer to do it in After Effects because I've been using this software for many years.

As far as render time, it depens on many factors. The speed of your machine, the size of the still pictures, the complexity of the project. For this, it's probably slower than FinalCut but it produce a better result.

grovberg · Nov 9, 2004, 04:56 PM

So just out of curiosity, what the *bleep* kind of images are you using that are 47MB? I mean, unless you're doing some kind of crazy 50x zoom, why in the world do you need an image file that big for video?

That being said, AE is what I've used in the past to do that kind of thing. Motion might be another option (basically the Apple version of AE), though I've not actually used it. I personally have never been pleased with the quality of the results of FCE using still images and graphics, though I've heard that's been improved in the newer versions. There are other options as well, but it kind of depends on your price range.

-Grover

jac · Nov 18, 2004, 10:31 AM

FYI I edited a video that only contained stills for my band, and did it entirely in FCP. If I recall the images were 6 MB and this allowed for lots of panning and zooming.
If you're interested check it out at: http://www.novoton.se/bbvideo_all.html

Oh, if you like the song more info about the band can be found here: http://www.novoton.se/blackbelt.html

PacHead · Nov 21, 2004, 05:54 PM

Originally posted by grovberg:
So just out of curiosity, what the *bleep* kind of images are you using that are 47MB?

I was wondering the same thing. What is he using, a 25 megapixel camera ? The hubble telescope ?

direktor · Nov 26, 2004, 01:50 PM

You can do what you need in Final Cut.

Import the stills in, but before you do that, go into preferences and set still duration to :02 frames.

Then drag the lot of them to a timeline. They'll pop up in the timeline in numerical order, all having 2 frames duration. If you have more than a couple seconds worth, it might have to render some of the strip.