Animating still images

Hi all. I'm new to Finalcut Pro X. Can anyone please tell me how to animate a still photo image? I would like to pan and zoom on each photo in my timeline. I used to use Pinnacle on the pc side, so I'm somewhat familiar with keyframing.
thanks much!

The easiest way is to use the "Ken Burns" effect. No need for plugins or keyframes.
Select the crop option, then click on "Ken Burns". Then just use the green and red rectangles to set in and out view of your picture.

Similar Messages

Adding animated gif to a still image, how do I do this?

I used to know how to do it, but I've forgotten.
Example: The person who told me how to do it had taken an animated gif (butterfly) and placed it on her breast in a still photo of herself. I know that she used Image Ready and as I recall, she created the same number of frames of the still image as the animated butterfly and then she somehow merged the two together. Can someone help, is there a tutorial somewhere? I'm using 7.0 by the way.
Thanks,
Ray
P.S. I also remember that it had something to do with linking the layers so that you just needed to place the first frame in the sequence and link all the other layers to it, but I'm totally lost now!

I don't believe that PS 7.0 supports animation, 'least I don't know how to use this function if it does. That is why I remember using Image Ready to do it. In Image Ready you can use any animated gif file to do what I want, I just can't remember how I did it. I do remember that I had to take my background image and duplicate it to get the same number of frames as the animated gif file, but I don't remember how I merged the two together. It had something to do with placing the first frame of the animated gif where I wanted it on my background and then using the link tool in the layer box to link them together, that way I didn't have to place each individual frame of the animation on to the background and avoid an alignment nightmare. I sure wish I would've taken notes!
Thank you for your suggestions.
Ray

Animation. How do I import still images in final cut pro x (from dragon frame) duration 3 frames pr. image?

Animation. How do I import still images in final cut pro x (from dragon frame) duration 3 frames pr. image? We have allready tried to set stillimages duration in preferences to 0,08 sek, but it does not have any effect!

You can drag your images to the timeline, select all, ctrl-d and set the duration to 3 frames by typing 3 and enter.
Or you can use Quicktime 7 to "open image sequence", select the desired duration, export your animation to quicktime and import that into FCP X for further editing.

Animating a sequence of still images

I wonder if you happen to know a quick way to do this in Final Cut Pro:
I've got 750 (or some other fairly large number of) still images I want to animate.
1) I want to drop all 750 into a sequence, ordered by name (so the 1st image is called (something like) image000, the second image is called image001, etc);
2) I want to drop them in so that each image is to be displayed for 1 frame, every 10 (or some other number of) frames (so image000 is displayed from 00:00:05;00 to 00:00:05;01. image001 is displayed from 00:00:05;10 to 00:00:05;11, image002 is displayed from 00:00:05;20 to 00:00:05;21, image003 is displayed from 00:00:06;00 to 00:00:06;01, etc.);
3) Now I want to make all 750 (or however many) into keyframes;
4) And then I want to cause in-between frames to be generated in between all of them, to fill those 9 (or however many) empty frames I've left between each
with images whose pixel values are smoothly interpolated between the keyframes.
I can figure out how to do a lot of this one at a time by hand (like setting keyframes, putting images every 10 frames, etc.), but it sure would be handy to do them as
batch jobs with single (or just a few) commands. Is Final Cut Pro even the right tool for doing this? Any help you can offer would be deeply appreciated. Thanks.
-Steve
Mac 4 x 2.5 GHz PowerPC G5 Mac OS X (10.4.8) 4GB DDR2 SDRAM

what your taliking about is called an animatic
and in fcp alot has to be done by hand so to speak .
i have to do these a few times a month for the show i work on .
and fading with such short frames doesnt not work well and why would you want fades for animation?its just more work .
the other thing your bringing up is a animation term called tweening (in betweeing frames)to smooth action.
scripts can be made for things like this but thats the fun of learning ,
i have spent time doing my scripts for this process and it can be a process.
welcome to the world of animatic storyboarding.

Animation sent as a group of still images, import as a movie file?

Hi
I have been sent an animation to use in a edit, but it has been delivered as a large group of still images, instead of a QT file. I was wondering if there was a way that the images can be imported so that they become a movie file that can be treated as such on the timeline, or if I have to spend the time assembling them back together on a sequence and then use that as a segmented file on another sequence?
I guess I am just trying to save time and the hassle of doing a lot of boring work. Any help will be much appreciated.
neil

Hi...
If you have QT pro you can import the image sequence and then export as mov.

I want to import still images to make a stop motion animation, but when I try to change the duration of still images, it isn't reflected in the timeline. How can I do this?

I want to import still images to make a stop motion animation, but when I try to change the duration of still images, it isn't reflected in the timeline. How can I do this?

Tonaw,
If you import your still images using iPhoto, then the time you set for each still, using FCPX Perferences works.
You can set the durantion from 1 frame to as long as you want them view.
If you do not use iPhoto to import your stills, the default is 10 sec's.
FYI: This issue was brought up within a month after FCPX was released. They found out by using iPhoto, you had better control of the amount of time your still was viewed.

How to Work With Still Images in Premiere Elements 10

I am struggling with the still images in my Titles for my video project, and would really appreciate some help. I have done a lot of googling on this and searched this forum, but can't seem to find the answer I need, maybe not searching the right questions or just "not getting it". Not even PE Adobe tips or Adobe TV cover this, although it seems important to know. I am not clear how PE10 will handle the resolution of an imported still image or graphic art from Photoshop. Perhaps this topic will also help others as well.
I am working on a video project for my job, editing an old training video. Created new Title graphics in Photoshop, inserted the Title images and integrated with video clips, then exported the video segments as MPEG files. I burned the whole video to DVD.
When the final DVD plays on a computer or TV screen, the photo images in the titles are fuzzy even though they were clear 300 dpi images. (I know dpi doesn't matter in video). The title text is also a bit fuzzy and the title text that has animation applied to it is even more fuzzy. Yet the old MPEG video clips look fine - it's just my title graphics and text that look bad (embarrasing).
So I need to know how to improve the quality of the still images/graphics for a video??
Project settings:
- Hard Disk, Standard 48kHz
- Editing Mode: DV NTSC
- Frame: 720 x 480 (0.9091)
- Frame rate: 29.97fps
- with "Optimize Stills" box checked
Using these settings because I am working with MPEG files from an old training video CD.
File Export: MPEG, NTSC DVD Standard
I export the video clips as MPEGS because they will be burned to a CD or DVD for distribution to our staff offices.
Work Details:
In Photoshop, I created still image graphics for each Title sized at 720 x480 with high resolution photos and company logo (300 dpi), and save them as a bitmap to import into PE10. In the Timeline, I insert the still image in "Video 1" track, then in Video 2 track create a Title over it for text (some animated, some still). Sometimes I stack 2 or three titles with text in separate video tracks over one still title image. Yes, there is a red line across the top in the Timeline because I didn't render the still images.
Questions:
• What is the best resolution for images imported into PE10 from Photoshop?
• Should I be creating title graphics/images at 720 x 480 or a larger ratio like 1920 x 1080 so it will display better when seen on a computer or TV?
• Do I need to render each title image in the timeline so that it will eventually display better in the MPEG?
• Is it better to create a title and then insert the still image into the title so they are integrated, rather than layered on separate video tracks?
I would greatly appreciate any assistance.

When the final DVD plays on a computer or TV screen, the photo images in the titles are fuzzy even though they were clear 300 dpi images. (I know dpi doesn't matter in video). The title text is also a bit fuzzy and the title text that has animation applied to it is even more fuzzy. Yet the old MPEG video clips look fine - it's just my title graphics and text that look bad (embarrasing).
Remember that DVD-Video was designed for CRT TV sets, and was a major step up from VHS tape. However, when viewed on an HD computer monitor, or HD TV *, it is still ONLY 720 x 480, with is about 1/4 of the resolution as 1920 x 1080, which is about what we are used to seeing on those display devices. That is but only 25% of the quality. It can never look as good as HD material.
Good luck, and if I missed something, please point that out to me.
Hunt
* With the advent of BD players, and up-rezzing DVD players, things HAVE improved, when viewing a DVD-Video on an HD TV. The newer players have up-rezzing chips, that do a very good job of "improving" the viewed material's quality. However, even with those amazing chips, DVD-Video will NEVER be as good as a full-HD source. Also, computers do not have those up-rezzing chips, so when one views a DVD-Video on a high-rez computer monitor, it will still look pretty bad. There ARE a couple of new DVD software players, that improve the quality of DVD-Video played on a high-rez computer monitor, and a few look fairly promising. I speculate that we will see some more development in the DVD-Video area, especially as BD is not proving to be the big seller, that many promised. Even 3D is not helping BD realize its promise.

Using still images with Final Cut (and the apple suite in general)

I have had a re-occuring and long term problem that has caused me many lost hours of head scratching and work arounds, and as of yet I have not been able to come up with a good solution.
Its to do with integrating still images with the Final Cut suite.
If I receive a high quality image from a client to use in their video and I then try importing it into Final Cut and animating it, it always ends up looking like a pile of ahem. Often I will get "swimming" lines appear across fine detail on the image, and parts of it will flicker as it moves across the screen. For instance, if I have a picture of some blinds or other fine detail (especially horizontal and vertical lines), when I add a grow and throw movement to it the detail will become very noisy - buzzing and flickering like mad.
I have found I can counter this by resizing the image in photoshop to a resolution closer to SD video (700w or 500h) - but I always end up losing detail, and the flickering and noise is only reduced, not eliminated. Other things that have helped are blur effects applied at a very low level, like 0.5 blur, so its not noticeable visually, but Final Cut seems to treat it differently and quieten the noise and flicker down.
However, all of these workarounds are ultimately still giving a reduced quality product.
Also, this problem is not necessarily constrained to Final Cut, I am currently fighting DVD Studio Pro because it is murdering the text quality in a stills slideshow I am creating - and in this situation there is no animation being applied. No matter what file type (psd, jpeg, tiff, png...) or size I output the text and images from Photoshop in, the moment DVD studio pro gets hold of it, it turns to cripe.
For a while I was putting it down to the fact that I usually edit in SD (PAL) formats, and there just wasn't the resolution available to reproduce fine detail. However, I do often see other people achieving pin-sharp fine detail on still images and text in SD formats (the Apple templates are a good example)
So, my question to you, oh great and high boffins, if you are dealing with still images and text, how do you do it? How do you work around any noise problems you have, and how do you produce those pin-sharp images (both moving and still) I see in other professional productions?
Quad G5 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

still images with too high a resolution will always cause problems. this is due to the detail of the image being finer than the scanline of the tv can display ... obviously this will caise the image to flicker as these details alternately appear and disappear as and when the scanline can display them. as you have discovered, the answer is to apply a very small blur, the effect being that the detail is spread by the blur such that the scanline can dislay it correctly.
text issues are often rooted in the same problem ... unless the text is placed very carefully (whole even number on the y axis) then the quality may be impaired due to the resulting interlacing/scanline issues

How do I change the duration of a still image in iMovie to less than 0.1 second?

I am creating a movie using iMovie where I need the still images to be 0.05 seconds each or maybe even less., but whenever I select the still images and go to "Clip Adjustments" and under duration change 0.1s to 0.05s and select "Done", iMovie changes the duration back to 0.1s. I'm fairly new to iMovie and I've been messing around with it for quite a while now and still can't figure it out. Could someone help me?

AppleMan1958 wrote:
… I have found there is a practical limit of about 3 to 5 frames where iMovie does not want to go shorter when using the Duration popup box.
for stop-motion there are perhaps better tools avail
istopmotion is a commercial app (starting at 40€ in the AppStore) offering additional tools for the animation master, such as onioning or tilt-shift.
http://www.dayofthenewdan.com/projects/time-lapse-assembler-1
is some very basic stills-assembler, stitches stills together only, therefor free ..........

How to export a short film made with still images without loosing quality?

Hi,
I have been trying everything to make a short film, which is made with still images, to look decent once exported however it is a real challenge. Here are the steps I have undertaken:
1- I prepare the photographs and give them the aspect ration of 720p and whatever height as I try not to crop them too much at 300dpi. They look great in photoshop or capture one. I then save them as.tiff. All the images are RGB.
2- I start a new project in premiere pro cs4 and make it DV Pal 25fps.
3-I import the images and place them on the timeline. If they are a bit too big I rescale them. The images seem to look ok on the timeline although I seem to have lost the deepness of the colours.
4-I render the work area
5-I export it as quicktime, dv pal, quality 100.
My dilemna is that although exporting with quicktime, dv pal, quality 100 seems to give me the best quality compared to using quicktime animation, mpeg2, cinemak, avi..., the images are still not as sharp as in Photoshop and the colours look a lot paler and washed out. Also, when looking close to the screens you can see tiny squares on the images although from distance it's not too bad. When I view it from the exported file using Nero it's not too bad although definitely not perfect, as soon as I try to make a DVD and import it in Adobe Encore CS4 or send it by Dynamic Link, the quality looks horrible with images that look soft if not blurred and completely washed out.
I have now tried about t bu15 versions to see what 's the best I still have not reached the optimum quality and since these will be shown on big tvs or projected onto screens I need to nail it.
Would anybody have any advice please please please?
Many Thanks

My overall advice is to do that kind of work in an application that is designed for that. Give Photodex Proshow Producer trial a crack at it. I do a lot of work with stills, and that IMO PSP is the best approach. If you are intermixing the odd still, Pr may get you by. If you plan on doing a lot of that, try proshow, where the workflow and extensive features are designed for making high quality videos from stills that can be output to a wide number of formats and destinations, including color management with many of them( including avi). And, no need to resize. I know this won't solve your present problem.
Obviously, your attempt in Pr has not worked out as you had hoped. Maybe a bit more info would help. How are you rescaling them in Pr? That might well account for some quality loss. What is the original format and size of the images? What color management are you using in PS? Are you using any color correction or effects in Pr? Is your project interlaced or progressive?
From your description, you are not even getting the quality you should be getting from Pr IMO, though as Jim says, it is video and it will never look as pristine as it does in PS, but it still seems to me that something you are doing has degraded the work more than normally would be expected.

Still Image Interlacing (Search did not solve my issue)

As I stated in the topic title, the search items for (still image interlacing) did not help with my problem. I'm trying to animate a bunch of stills for a slide show. The one thing I read over and over was that the pictures should be bigger than the viewer size in FCE.
I'm set for NTSC DV so 720 x 480, and the pictures are in the thousand pixel range (something like 2000 x 3000, high quality photos). I still get the interlacing. I read Tom Wolsky's FCP book entry however it did not help with the interlacing issue. If I do a batch edit in photoshop and change all the pictures to 720 x 480, would this solve the issue? I'm sure many of you have had this problem before, as I have, please let me know what you did.
what confuses me most is that it only happens with some pictures. I duplicated the animation and all the pictures are from the same camera, same SD chip and same size so I'm truly baffled by this. Please help me out, thanks.

It's true that stills should be bigger than the video format,
if you are moving them around and resizing them.
That won't affect the interlacing, but at least you won't
see the pixels from the still.
While doing motion and resizing, however, it's usually best to work
in a progressive format. In fact, it would be best if you
could stay progressive to the end. What format will
your final master be?
If your final deliverable is supposed to be interlaced,
you will usually see interlacing artifacts on a computer. But that's
not necessarily bad. When played on a regular analog TV,
the interlacing will function correctly and you won't notice it.
Are you really producing something for NTSC analog TV?

"Stuttering" when panning/zooming a still image...?

Hello.
I'm working on a small project which is basically a series of zooms/pans on still images. The pans/zooms are quite slow and take place over about 6-8 seconds. There's nothing too fancy going on here, but I notice that when I do a RAM preview or render out a comp, I get small "stutters" in some of them. Does anyone have any ideas why this would be happening and any suggestions on making these animations a little more "smooth". I mean, these things aren't complex at all, and overall they're quite smooth, but there's still times when I get these stutters and I can't figure out why they'd be happening? Would appreciate some advice!
Thanks,
Kristin.

There are certain speeds that sync up with frame rates so that they cause judders, jitters, stuttering or whatever you want to call it. The slower the frame rate the more obvious the problem.
If you've ever watched a western on TV or at the movies you've seen the stagecoach wheels turn backwards at various speeds. This is an example of the problem. It's actually called a stroboscopic effect. Mechanics, in the good old days when cars had carburetors and distributors, used to hook up a timing light to the #1 spark plug so that a light flashed on a timing mark on the crankshaft pulley. This light had the effect of stopping the rotation visually. That's exactly what's happening when you are moving your photograph across the frame at one of the critical speeds. Your eye is fooled and your brain can't process the movement smoothly.
There are also other cases where the sub pixel interpolation between frames causes areas of detail to flicker between frames. The latter problem can be seen by viewing your comp a frame at a time while zoomed in to say 800% and observing the edge detail. This problem can be especially nasty when you're trying to do a smooth title or credit roll. The horizontal lines that make up fine type can almost completely vanish between fields or frames if the text is moving at the wrong speed. You can test this out by creating a single pixel high horizontal line in AE and animating it from bottom to top of the frame. The only speed where you'll get a nice solid line in every frame or field is one that is an exact multiple of the frame rate. IOW, 1 frame 1 pixel of movement, 1 frame 2 pixels of movement, and so on. Move at 1 frame and 1.33 pixels of movement and the line will appear to completely disappear then return.
If you are working at 24fps progressive you'll find that the juddering caused by motion at critical speeds is much more problematic than projects at 29.97 fps. Interlacing, as was mentioned before, helps and gives you a wider range of motion, but interlacing can introduce more pronounced flickering in the detail if you are right at one of these critical speeds.
This problem extends to shooting as well. Cinematography manuals contain critical panning speed charts that list the number of degrees per second you can pan with various lens (angle of view) and shutter speed combinations. There isn't a videographer out there that's tried shooting 24P video and not ended up with an unusable pan due to these critical speeds.
The solution to successfully animating detailed images is to use the right speed (pixels per second) for your frame rate, add extra motion blur to hide the problem, or reduce the amount of detail in the image. These are the only solutions that I know of. They all limit design and timing, but what good is your design if it makes your eyes go buggy.
The best way I know if to tell if the problem is a playback issue is to use a device or program that tells you when you're dropping frames. You can use QT (by looking at the playback rate) or in FC or PPro by having the program report dropped frames. If it's a data rate issue you need more horsepower or a better codec.

Combine multiple still images into one clip PE 10

Is it possible to combine mulitple still images into a single clip? For example, I have 50 still images in a video track, each of which is a clip, and I want to combine them into single clip out of them so I can adjust the opacity without having to adjust each of the 50 clips individually. Any information is welcome. Thanks.

Mark,
I had done this but I was hoping there was an easier way to do it within PE, without having to export as a video file and then importing that video file.
One has to think about what PrE is doing with the Timeline, to understand why the Export/Share is necessary to get Stills/Clips to become one file. PrE is a non-destructive editor, in that it does not actually work with the Source Footage/Files, but only extracts data from them. What we see on the Timeline is really a proxy file, representing the edits that we are making. It is stored as XML language, with first links to the Source Files, and then a set of instructions on what we have done with that data. Since the Timeline is but a representation, of what we have done, there is no AV file - yet. That does not come about, until we Export/Share. At that point, PrE looks at the Project file (PREL), and notes exactly what data is required from the Source Files. The program then reads that information, and say gathers the data of Clip # 1 from 00;00;00;00 until 00;05;00;00, for use in the output file. It then moves to say Clip 2, and extracts the data needed there. Finally, the program processes that data, say adding Effects, and then Exports/Shares to a new file - creating that from the data, and the instructions. Still, the originals are not changed in any way - they are untouched, and only read from.
For instance, say we have a 20 min. Source Clip, and cut it into 30 tiny segments, "deleting" material between those. We have not really Cut that Source Clip, and we have not really deleted anything - only in our proxy file, and with the instructions in the PREL. It is the same with Still Images. We see them as separate Clips, with the Duration that we have set, and perhaps any animation that we have added via Keyframing the Fixed Effects>Motion>Scale (Zoom), and Motion>Position (Pan), but other than seeing those changes in the proxy file, used only for display of the Timeline and playback, nothing has been done yet. Then, upon Export/Share, when the output file is created, those changes are enacted on it.
Good luck,
Hunt

Best practices for creating movie from still images?

I have created an architectural model in *someone else's* software, and animated a camera in *someone else's* software, and rendered that out to still images. I rendered every 5th frame (for a total of 401 frames) in order to save time on rendering. My goal is to create a short movie (2 minutes) of the camera flying around the building.
When I imported all of the images, I stretched the duration so that they equally fit the 2 minutes, and used the keyframe assistant to sequence the layers. Now that I've done that, the movie is choppy (as I expected it to be, since I only rendered every 5th frame). Does anyone have suggestions as to what effect or transition can be used to smooth the sequence out? Or am I living in a dreamland and I need to go back and render every single frame? Is this even the software I should be using? I'm obviously a n00b, so any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Using After Effects CS4 (9.0.0.346) on Windows 7 64-bit

Or am I living in a dreamland and I need to go back and render every single frame?
You are. There is no effect that could automatically synthesize those missing frames even halfway realistically. Timewarp and Twixtor are only gonna make things look like a smear even with a lot of tweaking. By the time you have tweaked their settings and done all your masking and otehr corrections, your 3D render with all frames will be finished just as well and offer better quality.
Mylenium

Need basic "How To" for encoding still images for SD DVD slideshow

I recently purchased FCS2 and am not very computer savvy. I'm trying to create slideshows in DVD Studio Pro that are standard definition (so they can be played in most players), but are still excellent quality. The images I'm using are high resolution, professionally edited photos (with Adobe CS3 Elements). Once I burn it to a disk the image quality is very poor and after some trouble shooting I think I found my problem, the files are being resized automatically to fit with DVDSP and are losing quality. Can someone give me the quick "how to" with compressor to change my images to the correct settings? I've been reading and watching tutorials, but they all seem to focus more on video than still images. Any help is greatly appreciated.

When the final DVD plays on a computer or TV screen, the photo images in the titles are fuzzy even though they were clear 300 dpi images. (I know dpi doesn't matter in video). The title text is also a bit fuzzy and the title text that has animation applied to it is even more fuzzy. Yet the old MPEG video clips look fine - it's just my title graphics and text that look bad (embarrasing).
Remember that DVD-Video was designed for CRT TV sets, and was a major step up from VHS tape. However, when viewed on an HD computer monitor, or HD TV *, it is still ONLY 720 x 480, with is about 1/4 of the resolution as 1920 x 1080, which is about what we are used to seeing on those display devices. That is but only 25% of the quality. It can never look as good as HD material.
Good luck, and if I missed something, please point that out to me.
Hunt
* With the advent of BD players, and up-rezzing DVD players, things HAVE improved, when viewing a DVD-Video on an HD TV. The newer players have up-rezzing chips, that do a very good job of "improving" the viewed material's quality. However, even with those amazing chips, DVD-Video will NEVER be as good as a full-HD source. Also, computers do not have those up-rezzing chips, so when one views a DVD-Video on a high-rez computer monitor, it will still look pretty bad. There ARE a couple of new DVD software players, that improve the quality of DVD-Video played on a high-rez computer monitor, and a few look fairly promising. I speculate that we will see some more development in the DVD-Video area, especially as BD is not proving to be the big seller, that many promised. Even 3D is not helping BD realize its promise.

Animating still images

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