motion on stills- low to high res

[Chris Poisson]

Hi Amy,

I would recommend you look at Fotomagico. It is a far better interface than Moving Picture, very easy to use. You can work in your final rez no problem, and spit out SD sized movies for your offline. I use it with FCP all the time. Huge timesaver.

Go to boinx..com

Have a wonderful day.

[Amy Wilson]

Thanks for the suggestion. I have to time out the pictures’ motion with what’s going on in my timeline so the fact that it doesn’t seem to have that kind of capability ends up being more time consuming for me… but if this is the most straight forward way to be able to have hd and sd versions of the same motion, then maybe it will save time in the long run…
thanks.

[David Roth weiss]

Amy,

I animate extremely high res stills all the time, right in FCP, and never require a plugin. Fancy moves are rarely elegant when animating good photography.

Meanwhile, your biggest problem is going to be with the DV codec, which will degrade your stills, your text, and your graphics if you maintain that codec throughout post. All you need to do to is, when all of your editing is complete is to open the Sequence Settings and change the compressor setting to 8-bit, 10-bit, or Pro Res 422, and re-render the sequence. The video will look the same, but your stills, your graphics and your text will be preserved in their pristine state instead of being hit by horrible DV compression.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Amy Wilson]

I have high res stills but am using a lower res version of those stills for offline editing. Then when my edit is complete, I want to reconnect to the high res version of those stills when i take my project into an hd timeline and have all of the movements i used on those stills translate to the larger format. So I’m not concerned about the codec. I’m just concerned about having to recreate all of my movements in the online. Thanks.

[David Roth weiss]

Amy,

One of my favorite phrases is “no job is worth doing more than once.” I never do anything online/offline anymore. The downsides are numerous and the benefits are very few (if any), so it hardly seems worth it to me.

If I were doing things as you are doing them, I would simply put the stills in as placeholders, and wait to animate them, because there is no way your moves on a 4×3 canvas will translate to a 16×9 canvas later. Of course, nobody watching the project except you will understand why your stills aren’t animated, and that’s always a problem too.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Amy Wilson]

i agree with your favorite phrase. This is why I”m asking this question. My canvas is 16×9…working in 720×480, anamorphic. I would do what you are suggesting, but when the film is about a photographer and so much of our film has stills, its important to see if the way we are using them is working. Thanks.

[David Roth weiss]

[amy Wilson] “working in 720×480, anamorphic.”

So long as you’re working in an anamorphic timeline that will help in so far as basic moves are concerned, but you may still have to go in and make adjustments to scale at your keyframes when you do your hi-res version.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Rich Rubasch]

This might sound crazy but we do this all the time….except we build all our moves with the high rez images in AfterEffects. If we need a SD output we let AE do the scaling and render out SD versions. But we always have the HD comp. Actually with the mix of HD and SD we almost always start with a 1920 x 1080 comp in AE or in Photoshop. From there we can make it any format, including anamorphic etc.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Tom Brooks]

If I understand your goal properly, my solution would be to do the still animations in a Motion project at the full, final resolution. Export SD movies to cut into the offline. Once the video is up-rezzed, edit in the full-rez still animation sequences. Oops, I see Rich has suggested pretty much the same thing using After Effects.

[Peterson]

David,

In reading this & a few other posts you’ve made on the topic, you’ve remarked that you have no problems with the motion tab for controlling moves on stills… the problem I run across is when ( & usually only when) applying the ease in/out to the position key frame, which must be done not in the motion tab but rather directly on the canvas. The problem is that the default ( & I don’t know how to change this) seems to be for a longer ease in / out than the clip allows unless it is over 12-15 seconds long, resulting in some bongo boingo. But when going in to try and sfix this, control of the handles is often difficult for these keyframes as either the start and end are often off screen & require shrinking the canvas too much to be useful. Am I way off here? A tip or two would be great!

Thanks,

Peter Tooke