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Is it Dumb to Create ProRes Video from JPEG Stills?
Hi All,
I’m doing stop motion animation with a software called iStopMotion. It captures stills in JPEG format and then gives you the option to export image sequence video from the captured still images. I’ve been exporting in Apple’s ProRes 422, but have since realized that the JPEG files, due to their compressed format, may have already lost the data that would make the video file worth exporting as ProRes. Does anyone know anything about making videos from JPEG files, and if so, is it dumb try to make high quality video from them? Web searches on this topic lead nowhere.
Many Thanks!
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4 Replies
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First, thumbs-up on Boinx iStopMotion. Very fun software. As far as your question, if you’re capturing the still at their maximum bit depth, that’s all you can do… but maybe it’s not a waste, because once you’re operating in prores 422, at least you’re not losing any more… and the potential for editing with more layers and effects in FCPX or Prem Pro or whatever is better if you can operate in prores. IStopMotion is very good for the price point, if you’re concerned about higher quality, then maybe ToonBoom or something more higher-end is really what you’re wanting.
That said, when people ask me what software is best, I say: “the one you like the most”. because, if you like it, you spend more and more time with it, and that leads to mastery and efficiency and an output that will rival whatever the competition is. If the interface is intuitve for you, and you like the workflow, Keep going.
One idea that comes to mind is, you probably have photoshop. PS can run batch actions on your grabs and convert them to tiff or other formats. It won’t add resolution or detail that wasn’t there before, of course. But if you need the stills to be upscaled, so you can do more synthetic pans and zooms and croppings in a video edit, that might be an option. Apple Compressor and a few others can also do that.
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Thanks for the reply, Mark. Yeah, my main concern is long-term integrity, AKA archiving, with the final video file. Well, that and practicality. No point in making a prores 422 file if it is largely “empty” (sort of like making a prores archival file from an h.264 file). I think I’m going to switch to Dragaonframe as I can capture in .tiff, which is uncompressed.
Thanks again!
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Good idea to go for .tiff files. They are much better quality than .jpg. A side effect of .jpg is if you make any changes to it, and then save it with the same name it loses even more quality. Tiff files don’t do that.
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Thanks Graham!
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