Images into a Movie?

Mark

What method/program do you use to combine a series of exported images into a movie file?

I have heard suggestions of:
-Windows Movie Maker
-Quicktime Pro
-Adobe Premiere Elements

What do you think of these?

Thanks.

Frederik

I use VirtualDub...
Although it's free, it's very powerful..!!

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP).
It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.

cheffey

We use Quicktime Pro for compiling images and then drop the compiled movie in Final Cut for adding audio, but there are comparable options out there for free or almost free. Movie maker works fine but there's just not enough customization. iMovie is better if you have a mac.

brodie

I've used Adobe Premier Elements with good success. I considered PRO (work was paying for it either way) but went w/ Elements because it is more user friendly and I didn't need the extra bells and whistles. All I really used it for was to compile a ton of png.'s and add some music which it did very well w/o much learning curve. I haven't used the other programs though so I can't compare. I've heard a lot of good things about Virtual Dub which was already mentioned though if you go the free route. Adobe was like $99 which isn't bad at all.

-Brodie

dylan

Paul Russam created a very good tutorial about this:

http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=654&p=3731&hilit=adobe#p3728

Dik Harrison

I use Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum to compile my animations. I tried Movie Maker, but like the versatility of Movie Studio. I can use it for the entire production after I get the images from SU.

Mark

Thanks for the input guys.
I downloaded Virtual Dub, but am a bit overwhelmed with the amount of options. And the one series of images that I did manage to make into a movie clip was about 1.5 gigs. compared to 20 mgs coming out of Movie Maker. Obviously I am doing something wrong. Any suggestions?

otb designworks

Hi Mark.

When you export out a series of images, and compile them into a movie (a complete no brainer in Quicktime Pro) your resulting movie will be the file size of all of the images added together.

If, for example, you export out png's (uncompressed output and therefore great for post production editing) your resulting "raw" movie can easily get into the gigabit file size range.

Once you have used Quicktime to open the image series, I will save the "raw" movie as a reference movie to save disk space. This, however, is NOT a finished product and is useless for anything other than being the movie that you will use to edit or export out in whatever compressed format you desire.

My workflow, for example, goes like this:

export animation from SU as a series of png's

Use Quicktime to open the series as a movie.

Save result as a reference movie.

Open reference movie in final cut (or whatever editing software you prefer) and use it for any editing I may need.

Export final version out in a distributable, compressed format (I use h.264 almost exclusively, FWIW)

If you don't need to edit the reference movie before generating a final version, you can choose to export the movie straight out of Quicktime in whatever format suits your purposes.

The benefits for using image sequences as your SU animation export are many, but the biggest, by far, is that if SU happens to crash mid export, you can restart your export from the most recent scene without having to start from the beginning. When you do 40 and 50 hour exports, this becomes very very important. I never export any animations any other way, ever.

Lastly, the link posted earlier to Paul's tutorial is a must read, in my opinion. Read it and use his suggestions! Exporting out at twice the desired final resolution is critical to beautiful animations. If, for example, you want your final movie to be 1280x720 (720p HD), then you need to export out at 2560x1440. You choose the final desired size when you export your reference movie out to your final version.

Hope that helps.

Frederik

@mark said:

I downloaded Virtual Dub, but am a bit overwhelmed with the amount of options. And the one series of images that I did manage to make into a movie clip was about 1.5 gigs. compared to 20 mgs coming out of Movie Maker. Obviously I am doing something wrong. Any suggestions?

I assume that you haven't used any codec when assembling the video...?!

The Cinepak codec by Radius, is perhaps the safest choice of codecs for general usage...
Cinepak's main advantages are that the codec is already installed on most machines, and that it can play video reliably even on older machines such as Intel 486 computers...
Its disadvantage is that, when compared to other codecs, it tends to produce lower quality and larger file sizes...

You can get free codecs at Codec-Download.com...

Also - you need to make sure that you're using an appropriate output size as well as using an appropriate FPS setting...

To get a smooth animation I recommend that you use 24fps...
(Expert setting 23.98fps European PAL – 29,97fps full NTSC)
Resolution should be set to 768x576

You can read much more about proper video settings on the Internet http://lipas.uwasa.fi/~f76998/video/conversion/