Working with Stills

Hey guys,

I've some stills i need to edit into a sequence as part of an ep. What are some cool ways to edit a sequence of stills? Any interesting editing styles/examples for stills?

Do a forum search on "Stills" & look in the FAQ...tons have already been discussed on this.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

When we do still seqs we use Shine lens flares in AE for transitions and slow zoom IN/Out in FCP...it is always a challenge to make still sequences look exciting in a program, I guess that is why Rostrum camera work is so costly. If you want to see some great stills editing check out the film 'Dogtown and the Z Boys' - great film edited with vibrance and many stills. Phil UK

[www.digitaljuice.com]
Check out this video tutorial, it should give you some ideas, if your up to the task the 2.5d animation is a really killer way of animating photos.

That's a concise tutorial-- love the 2.5D part-- but he glosses over a couple things:

1) Don't use JPEGS for photomotion, JPEGS are crap compression-- the artifacts often hit the scanlines and twitter like crazy. By the time you set the compression of a JPEG to maximum quality you might as well be using what you SHOULD use-- PSD or TIFF's, RGB format.

2) Nothing about scanning rich for crisp enlargement.

Follow this to learn more:

Intelligent photo scanning for video.

- Loren
Photo scan rates demystified!
ScanGuide? Pro compact reference now at the LAFCPUG Store !

Thanks for the help guys! Was great. I didn't get to try out the 2.5d animation yet, but i probably will get my hands wet on it over the weekend.

Loren, thanks for the tip. I usually work in tiff or tga, preferably tiff as it can contain layers. PSDs are always a nest and it's a hassle unless i'm going to work on individual layers of a picture.

Here's an exerpt from a ken stone article... but why?

> If you plan on enlarging the photo or doing a 'pan and scan' in FCP, your image will need to be
>worked from the start at 300 dpi, but everything else will be exactly the same.

I heard this was to prevent the lines from buzzing, as huge frame sizes end up buzzing badly in final cut (not to mention lag). So if i was to plan a 300% zoom, i should scan in a photo at slightly larger than 720x576 (PAL) but set it at a minimum of 72 dpi x 300%?