Create video with still images from digi cam?

JohnMuellerJD wrote on 2/12/2004, 12:44 PM
Hello,

I want to create a DVD quality video of a bike path near my home. The result being a fast motion video of the trail whereby one can watch the entire trail at roughly 360 mph. Last summer, I took my Sony TRV-120 to the trail, walked six steps, centered the shot, filmed two seconds, walked six steps, centered the shot…etc. I took the several hours of footage home, put it through Vegas, split the frames so I had one frame for every six steps, moved that frame with the pan/crop devise to a center it, and rendered the video to MPEG-2 (result about 2000 frames). Sure, this took a few hundred hours, but looked O.K. It was smooth enough, but I am not satisfied with image quality. I want great.

When watching the video at normal speed (29.97fps) it is not bad, but when I pause the DVD at any given frame, I am not getting what I consider a clear quality image that looks like it was “professionally” done with quality equipment (go figure).

Here are my questions. All responses are greatly appreciated. I am planning on buying a digital camera. Would I solve my problem of quality by reshooting the trail at approx every six steps with a 5 megapixel camera, then placing each image as one frame on the timeline, then doing what I did above? Would not this appear better than a great video recorder? Logically, I can’t understand why this would not solve my problem and allow me to produce a great looking video that looks like it was made with film? Should I output at 24fps or does that not matter? Is there something I should keep in mind that a beginner (like myself) would not catch? Any camera recs? All input and comments on this topic are greatly appreciated.

Also, if anybody would like to see a part of my “unsatisfying” video for comments, please let me know where I can post it or Email it.

Thanks.

John

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 2/12/2004, 1:00 PM
NTSC video is only about 0.3 megapixels per frame, so you won't see an enormously better result because of using a 5 megapixel camera. I suspect the big difference would be that the pictures you get from a digital still camera will be non-interlaced. The TRV-120 shoots interlaced video and when you pause it you are seeing either only half the resolution or two fields combined together. Either of these conditions can reduce the clarity of the image. Using the non-interlaced stills you can render a progressive (non-interlaced) MPEG-2 file which should have cyrstal clear stills.

There is another advantage to using the 5 megapixel camera. Since your shots aren't all going to be perfectly centered with each other (a fact you already noted by having to pan/crop them) you may have ended up with most of the images not filling the entire frame unless you cropped in to zoom them bigger. With the footage from your TRV-120 you only had 720x480 pixels to work with and any cropping meant that the image had to be made up of fewer pixels being spread out. However, the images from your still camera will be something like 2560x1920. This means that you can zoom in quite a bit to make sure you always fill the frame without having to go below 720x480.
corug7 wrote on 2/13/2004, 6:49 AM
Just remember that you are working with much more information with each of those 5mp stills versus your video stills. You will probably need to render every 30 frames or so to keep your computer from locking up, depending on the file format and how fast your computer is.