Programs for animating many digital photographs?

March 21, 2006 9:19 PM

What programs are best suited for animating many digital photographs, and adding sound and music?

My friends and I have put together several stop-motion animations (along the lines of YTMND's "Butt Racing Grand Prix." ) Most of them have been short, around 200 to 500 shots. The latest one, however, uses easily 2000 digital photos. Even after resizing all the shots to 500x375 and using low-quality GIFs, I've had no success animating it in any program I've tried. (I'd rather not do it in pieces, as there are some continuous sound effects and music I'd like , and it would 'ruin the illusion.')

With the shorter ones, I'd use the "load folder as frames" option in Adobe ImageReady, export as a .swf flash document, and then load into Flash 8 to add sounds and other effects. The new one can barely export from ImageReady, but Flash 8 can't seem to handle this amount of data - even with a gig of ram and a huge pagefile, "out of memory" errors abound.

Would a professional video editing program, like Premiere or Final Cut be more suited to this task? I played around with my school's video editing Mac G5s with Final Cut Pro, but they didn't seem to have an option for importing these pictures and animating them. Help a budding animator out!

(The original plan was to make a high-quality version to put on my school's TV channel using near-full-quality images, but I'd be happy just with a web-friendly, hopefully Flash version now. But, if any of you have a magic solution, I'd be more than happy to hear it!)

posted by nervestaple to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I believe that Sony's Vegas can do what you're asking.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 9:44 PM on March 21, 2006

i use GraphicConverter on my mac to string together N image files into a quicktime movie:

- file -> convert...
- navigate to the directory the files are in
- click and shift-click to select the N images (they should be named sequentially so that GC sees them in the right order)
- change the output format to MooV (quicktime) and set up the compression to how you want it
- hit convert! takes about 5-10 minutes for 1000 images at 400x400 pixels. probably longer for larger pictures

then you can add fx and music in pretty much any editing program.
posted by sergeant sandwich at 10:06 PM on March 21, 2006

Either Vegas or Premier will do what you want. If you are on a mac, iMove is sufficient. You don't need to buy FCP. The last time I tried this, it was much easier in Vegas than Premier.

If you run into memory problems then try creating short segments, maybe 100 frames at a time. Press these segments into lossless video, then assemble the video segments into the final video.

I don't know if it is better to make 20 short videos and assemble them or to keep adding 100 frames at a time to a master video, rendering it, and then reloading it. You should play around with that a bit.

Don't forget to render your final video into a compressed format.
posted by b1tr0t at 10:10 PM on March 21, 2006

I'm gonna put in my standard answer to this question, which has been asked n times on mefi: mencoder.

It is available for pretty much any unix as well as 'doze. It is free.
posted by polyglot at 2:23 AM on March 22, 2006

I have animated shorts using flash, blender, premier5+, after effects, gimp animation plugin, stop motion pro, etc. and I find premier to be great for editing from still frames. just set the frame rate in the prefs before you import the stills. it lets you drag the timing of the frames after theyve been dropped to create holds - great for adding a sense of timing. very drag and drop, intuitive and quick to make edits. .gif will only playback so fast so stick to a low framerate. GIMP is the best for editing .gif and swapping between optimized and unoptimized and fiddling with indexing.
posted by psychobum at 6:53 AM on March 22, 2006

forgot to mention that premier wont let you make effects on a sequence of images easy, so you either have to render it to an avi and add the fx or use something like after effects, which is more of an animators tool. also stop motion pro is cool for doing time lapse, stop motion, and rotoscoping.
posted by psychobum at 6:57 AM on March 22, 2006

In FCP you can not only change the frame rate (which you DON'T want to do if you're going to video or DVD), but if you go into the user prefs, I think it's the second tab, you can change the still image duration.

Make it 2-3 frames and you can import + drag and drop all of the stills and auto aseemble the sequence.

If you're going to do more sophisticated effects you can dabble in Motion and AE.

Truthfully, I'd likely add the audio in AE, leave markers where I'd want some "key" moves and do the work in AE....but editing software will do the job.

The rest is getting your compression settings right (such as flash video)
posted by filmgeek at 5:22 PM on March 22, 2006