Killing myself over a stop motion project…

[Davide Marchesi]

Hello everyone, I hope as well your proposal went well.

My problem similar to Walter’s, thus I thought I could ask here too. Basically I have some sequences of pictures I imported in AE. Frame rate is set at 24 fps and the resolution of the original stills is 4256×2832 (shot with Nikon D700). Initially I thought I would go about it resizing and/or cropping the bunch of pictures in Photoshop and then importing the pictures with new dimension of 1920×1080, perfectly fitting HD 16:9 presets. I guess it’d work perfectly this way (or the way Erik described too). On the other hand, now I’m thinking to add some simple simulated camera movements to the footage through anchoring and moving the centre of the video up or down, left or write. In order to do that, the video has to be a little bit larger than 1920×1080 of course. Although it would still be acceptable to enlarge a 1920×1080 footage in order to do what I want, it seems pointless to me to scale down the images/footage size in Photoshop if afterwards I will have to enlarge it again, that would leave me with a very unnecessary loos of quality.

I am also very new to After Effects and just dragging the image sequence with its original size (4256×2832) in a composition of 1920×1080 is giving me some problems (i.e. the preview won’t load all the way, but just partially and the exported .mov file is really stuttering a lot in QuickTime and, I believe, in Final Cut Pro too). Oh, yeah, my goal is to get sequence of footage I can edit on FCP.

Do you have any suggestion on how I could do this?

[Jonathan Ziegler]

Sounds like you might be better off creating a video at the full resolution (4256×2832) and then drop that into your 1920×1080 timeline. You will need to crop no matter what because neither share the same proportions (unless you want pillarbars). In that case, just create the video from the original files in Quicktime, save to a self-contained movie and import into After Effects. You can also just make the video in AE, but I like Quicktime Pro better for image sequences made to video. I don’t have a technical explanation, but they just seem to work better. I also generally use ProRes422 (not HQ, but you can use it if you like). The files are huge, but there you go.

Now, you can crop and such in Photoshop first if you like, but I think you’ll have more overall versatility. If memory is a problem, consider making a low-res version for editing in Compressor as well.

Jonathan Ziegler
https://www.electrictiger.com/
520-360-8293

[Davide Marchesi]

Thanks for your ideas, Jonathan. I believe that if I if I decide to work with videos at full resolution, I could just use the motion controls of FCP without needing to use After Effects. Or do you think that importing the big files into AE and then using it to convert them would work better?

The only problem would be previewing them in Final Cut Pro, I think it would be impossible to run them smoothly (just like the tests I made with QuickTIme Pro were impossible to play at a normale pace on my computer). I’ll have a try.

[Jonathan Ziegler]

If you make them large i don’t see any reason to bring into AE. You can make an image sequence in AE if you want too. I was thinking of potential memory issues is all.

Jonathan Ziegler
https://www.electrictiger.com/
520-360-8293