Movie Made of Still Images

[David Roth weiss]

Unlike FCP 5, FCP 4.5 does not handle large stills very well. If you are animating them, do it in AE and edit the results in FCP.

[Tim Danyo]

Why do you need to keep the files bigger than HD? It seems like a resourse drain with no real benefit.

tim

[Levinehn]

Thanks for the reply about why I want them bigger, that is certainly a key consideration, and for some of the images, we will be doing rathr drastic rostrum style moves such as zooming out from a CU to a Wide Shot within the same still image.

And to David Ross, thank you for the advice about animating in AE and then transfering to FCP. If I worked entirely in FCP 5, would it be possible to do the complete edit in FCP 5 without going back and forth with AE?

Thank you for comments so far,
Nathan

[David Roth weiss]

Nathan,

BTW, I am David Roth Weiss, or just David Weiss…

And yes, you could do the whole job in FCP, but ver 4.5 does not handle large pix very well, and its rendering engine is apparently not nearly as good or as fast as FCP 5.

DRW

[Ben Oliver]

seriously….use vegas video….its amazing with still images.

very amazing, ive done some rad work in vegas with stills, that i’ve never been able to re-create in fcp.

[Levinehn]

Thank you David,

I’ll try it out with a buddy who has FCP 5.

And thanks Ben,

Someone else recomended Vegas to me recently as well. If I were to use Vegas, do you know anyting about how high quality the final product could be / onlining the final product? Also, any idea about Vegas interfacing with sound mixing program (probably pro-tools)? The ultimate goal is to export for projected screenings on either Digi-Beta, some form of HD, or film.

Thanks,

Nathan

[Levinehn]

Thanks for the reply Dave,

I appreciate the suggestions, testing it with a digital projector is my next plan of attack. And yes, the final output should be decided before starting…

Thanks,

Nathan

[Josh Weiss]

I understand that you want to maintain the full resolution of your images and of course that is wise. However, you do not want to work in a timeline that is 4000×4000 or anything like that. Your final medium will be HD at largest resolution. So the largest timeline you would need to deal with is 1920×1080 and of course you can shrink the images to fit or pan and zoom on the images. Therefore from a resolution standpoint there is no need for using AE. However, I do like keyframing in AE better than final cut. As suggested do a few tests. If its just simple pans and zooms FCP5 would definitely suffice. Not sure about 4.5 as I am not as familiar with it. Remember, especially for VHS and DVD you are looking at SD or DV resolutions of 720 x 486 or 720 x 480.

[Levinehn]

Thank you to everyone for all the helpful suggestions, I’m glad to have gotten some good advice before doing tests.

Thanks,
Nathan

[Ben Holmes]

Just to reiterate what jwedit said, the relevent resolution is that of the final output, not the maximum resolution of the stills – if you drop a large resolution still into an HD timeline, FCP will initially adjust the scaling so it fits in the frame (say 30% scale). You can then adjust this scale back up and reposition each still so that only the relevent part you need is in frame.

You asked what types of still to use. The less the JPEG compression the better. JPEG compression is very visible on video, and will stop you from zooming in as far as you want on many occasions. Try to use whatever format gets you as close as possible to the RAW files. That said, 12mp is pretty big, and I’m not sure how FCP will cope with it. Trial that on a system first and USE A SYSTEM WITH PLENTY OF RAM.

Finally, and as a FCP user who HATES the AE interface, I really shouldn’t say this – but AE does a better job with stills movement. It will allow you to make huge collages of stills and zoom in, out and around them at will. See the excellent “Dogtown and the Z-boys” for examples of this. If you want an elegant solution and workflow for half the effort and twice the useability of AE, use Combustion, it’s great.

I suppose one MORE choice wasn’t what you were looking for? OK, use AE over FCP ANY DAY for this kind of project, there are many excellent tutorials around to help you set things like this up. As I said, I hate AE as a user experience, but it beats FCP for motion effects hands down. FCP is an excellent editing tool, but you need a compositing tool like AE or combustion for this kind of project – IMHO

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
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