My son has returned from backpaccking round the world with 2 years worth of digital stills. I want to make a video (movie!) from the best of these, but not a slide-show.
With printed pictures one cam pan & zoom to liven them up, but not with digital pics?
There are far too many to spend much time on each.
Suggestions please.
I have Prem. Pro.
Alan.
what resolution are these digital stills ?
if more than 720x576 you can treat them as you would a scanned image and pan/scan/zoom as much as you want within the restriction of the resolution.
Alan,
Canopus Imaginate or Lumidium's Digirostrum will allow you to do rostrum camerawork on good quality digital stills.
I've been using Imaginate for a while now and find it very good.
Alan
Imaginate is very good for this. If you also have Photoshop Elements or something similar, you can open a very large page and place several digital images on it, rather like the page of an album. Save (say as tga) and then import into Imaginate and pan and zoom over it, rostrum camera style, to create you video. It is a useful way to include several pictures into a single avi sequence.
I agree with cougar, Imaginate is the best way to go. You will of course have the expence of buying the programme, but it is well worth the money and is a very comprehensive program that is able to do zooming, panning, etc.
Mike
Imaginate does seem to be popular for this sort of work and if you go to the Canopus site and successfully follow all the links there seems to be a free download version to try out the software.
NL
Of course you can manipulate digital images in video, I've been doing it for years. And I've never used anything other than NLE software to do it. Cinestream does it very well indeed. You just need to be sure that you got enough pixels to do it.
Alan Roberts, your reply makes me think I should be able to pan & zoom in Prem Pro alone. I like the idea of not spending anymore money, but how do you do it?
Alan.
Yes, Premiere 5.0 could do it, so the latest should as well. Look at the "Motion Path" filter (unless they've changed the name). You specify the path of the image, and the size, I call that Pan and Zoom.
Hi
Stills in Premiere work well but you sometimes get a flickering effect. This can easily be sorted by applying an anti flicker filter or tweaking the correct settings. Sorry I can't be more detailed but I'm sure someone else will explain.
Til
The problem you get when you use stills in video is that the vertical resolution of the still may be higher than video can cope with. Typically, a still should not have more than about 450 pixels of vertical resolution when it hits the video for rendering. To explain:
If it had exactly 576 pixels vertically (i.e. lines) and was sharp, then you'd get alternate lines of the still on alternate lines of the frame. Imagine venetian blinds, nearly horizontal. Lines of the image would be very different from their neighbours, but would appear on only one field at a time, so you get "interline flicker" which is widely known in television as "interlace twitter". The solution is to prevent vertical resolution from being high enough to cause it. That means having fewer lines of image resolution (like about 450), or using a softening filter to reduce the high frequency content of a higher resolution image.
EditDV was/is very good at this, having filters that got it right (partly because I explained all this to the software writers while it was being developed into Cinestream 3). Professional NLE and effects software get this right without the operator having to consider it, and that's why it's expensive. Consumer NLE rarely even considers it, so you have to be alert to the problems, and prepared to fix it yourself using filters.
Hope that helps.