My conversion of Contingency
to video moved ahead this week. I have about half of the images converted to
video now. I had to overcome a few snags.
The whole film runs a bit over 3,800 frames, but since I
already have video of some of the shots, I didn’t need to transfer all of them.
It still left me with 2,300 frames to convert. This week I got 1,100 done, or
about 48 per cent.
The week before I shot all the frames I wanted on the
optical printer. It isn’t too difficult to import them into Premiere Pro and
create a video. Unfortunately, I ran into a few problems.
The first was that the images were in RAW format, which I
couldn’t import into Premiere Pro. I converted them to jpg’s with Picasa. I
started with the same resolution as the raw files (3522 by 2348), but that
really slowed down Premiere Pro to the point I couldn’t use it. I changed to
800 by 534, which is still larger than the 720 by 480 video I want to produce.
That worked better.
The next snag was image jitter. Apparently the optical
printer didn’t align each frame in exactly the same spot. I don’t know if it
was a problem with the machine, or with how I loaded it.
Premiere Pro allows you to move the images around in the
frame, so it was possible to adjust each frame to remove the jitter. That was
easier said than done.
The first show wasn’t too bad because it was a title. I over
lay a horizontal line and moved each frame so that the title aligned with the
line. It was very finicky work though.
For the next shot, also a title, I overlay one of the frames
on top of the other frames, switched it to a negative, which is called invert
for some reason I don’t understand, then made it 50 per cent transparent. When
I aligned the frame properly, I would get a grey screen. It never fit exactly,
but it was easier and faster.
The rest of the shots were not tittles, which was a little
harder. I used the same technique, but it turned out that since the camera
moved during the shot, the edge of frame would move in and out of view. I had
to go back and move every frame up a little so the edge wouldn’t show. I also
had to zoom in, which took more time.
After a couple more shots I did a little research and found
I could use the paste attributes feature of Premiere pro to save a bit of time.
Eventually I came up with another trick that made a big
difference. I put the frame images into a sequence that set up as high
definition. When I was done with the HD version, I would set up a standard
definition sequence and put the HD version in the time line. Then I could move
and zoom the whole shot to give the image I wanted.
That also allowed me to use the frame borders to align the
frames. There were always imperfections in the border I could use for
alignment.
I had a lot of trouble with Premiere Pro crashes. The
process seems to have pushed the system to the limits. It got better as I got
more practice.
I know that some video cameras have an image stabilizer
function, which should mean that there is a software method to do all the
realignment automatically. I wasn’t able to find one. I didn’t look too hard
though.
The rest should take a couple of days to do. Then I need to
incorporate all the shots into a final video. Some of the shots could use some
colour correction. I hope to post the final video by the end of next week.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
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