Movie from still images ?

[Guest]

Hello,

Not sure if this is the right forum to ask this question.

I have a large number of time lapse still images from my digital camera and I want to make them into a short movie and maybe add some music and titles.

They are in JPEG out of the camera (if that matters).

Can anyone recommend to me thier thoughts on the best program to do this with.

Thanks for your help.

Tim...

 

[the_Prisoner]

I assume you could use any device with a video editing program. The problem is for video you need 30 FPS(frames per second) or it will look jumpy. In other words, 30 images per second. That would be alot of still images. Now if you are basically making a slide show it would work.

With an editing program you can use music, voice and titles.

the Prisoner

I'm not a number, I'm a free man!

 

[elzt]

Well, if you're talking about slide show, there are two programs that are designed just for that, PictureToTV and Photo2VCD. Both do similar things and are very easy to use.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the replies so far.

Rather than a slide show, I wanted to try and make the images into an "animated" (ie - to show motion) little movie.

I have around +800 images (shot over a whole day) showing the streetscape from my building from morning to night, shot every minute for the day. (before you ask, my camera does this automatically so I do have a bit of a life ;-)

30fps would give me about under 30 seconds of "movie" and be a little confusing to the eye (given that every frame of the 30 show in one second would be quite different (people, cars etc).

Would a program like Adobe Premier (or something cheaper let me string my pictures together into a movie but at a slower frame rate (maybe 10-15fps) ?

I realise that to meet the video standard it needs to actaully display 30fps, but can I tell it to say "take these 834 frames and show each one for xx amount of time (0.0833 seconds) one after the other" thereby giving me a final result with a visual "frame rate" of 12fps that still meets the 30fps required for display.

THis is my first attempt at this time lapse thing and once I get the technique down, I want to use it for other things (flowers opening closing etc... all those cliches)

Thanks again

Tim....

 

[the_Prisoner]

I am sure if the software will do that but I guess you could
take one picture and add to three frames for example.
Same picture times 3 plus second picture times 3 etc. You would have to experiment, it might take 10 of the same picture or more then 10 of the second picture and so on. You would need to have the camera take maybe a picture a second or alot faster to create a smooth motion. Time lapse for a flower would be fine, a picture every minute or so, but for a street scene, you need more images. It would just be too jerky. Long exposure times give a streaky effect that is cool.

Now doing a claymation thing would be like taking a picture then moving the object slightly, another picture and so on to give an animated look. What you are trying to do, would be more like this.

Anyways, Pinnacle Systems and others sell editing software.

Also, try posting at <A HREF="http/digitalvideoediting.com" target="_new">Digital video editing's website</A>, they might have a better idea.

the Prisoner


I'm not a number, I'm a free man!

 

[bw37]

I've done this with Sonic Foundry's "Video Factory" software. It's a "lite" version of their "Vegas Video" software.

My son needed to make a "movie" for school, so we shot single frame jpeg's with our web cam and then put them together in Video Factory. We varied the time per image to fit the required audio track (narration, dialog and of course, explosive, 11 year old, sound effects ). It worked out fine though it wasn't the easiest to figure out how to control the time per frame at first.

Since then we bought my son "Lego Studios" which does much the same thing, but (I think) restricts you to images (both still and video clips) taken with the program and it's web cam. It automatically makes video clips of each series of still's you take. This makes it much easier to do the final editing since you work with say 20 video clips instead of thousands of single frames.

Video Factory is mostly intended for use with DV input material, but lets you use almost any source material (video and audio) in nearly any way you wish. If you can find it, it's pretty cheap for what it can do. It lets you output the finished piece in lots of ways, too, though I don't have much experience with most of them.

Have fun,

BW