DSLR timelapse workflow?

BruceUSA wrote on 9/7/2012, 9:56 AM

I am having truoble importing into Vegas Pro 11 as Image Sequence. First I got an error because the image are to large. If I was able to imported and I tried to crop the image to 16x9 BUT the won't change to 16x9. Why?

Many of you have done DSLR timelapse. So please help me out how to do it. Thanks you

Comments

john_dennis wrote on 9/7/2012, 11:03 AM

I haven't done a timelapse in Vegas Pro 11 but did quite a few in 10.

My image sequences were from Canon still cameras and all the pictures were less than 4000x3000 jpegs.

Not on a workstation at the moment, but you should be able to apply a 16x9 crop box to a picture on the timeline and copy event attributes to all the other pictures.

BruceUSA wrote on 9/7/2012, 12:21 PM

John,

My Still image are 5184x3456 Jpegs. When I tried to crop the image sequence on the TL, it won't change to 16x9.
If I import the still image one by one and then I can crop the image to 16x9 on the TL. But that is not what I want. I want image sequence that I can crop it to fill the screen (16x9)

rs170a wrote on 9/7/2012, 12:31 PM

Use a free tool like IrfanView and shrink all your images by half (make sure these go to a new folder).
IrfanView has a batch processing feature that is extremely fast.
Once this is done, import your images as a still image sequence and crop that to 16x9.

Mike

ddm wrote on 9/7/2012, 12:39 PM

How large are your images?

Several ways to do this but here's one..

New project, select desired template (example:HD 1080-60i (1920x1080, 29.970 fps)

Go to Options/preferences/Editing and change "New Still Image Length" to the desired length (I usually need to experiment with this setting depending on how many frames per second you set up when you did the time lapse) Example 0.150 equals 4 frames at 29.97

In Explorer window, select all (control a) and drag all down to timeline, should stay in order.

Click on the Event Pan/Crop icon on the first frame in the timeline, choose from preset dropdown 16x9 and you will see how your image is going to be cropped, most likely a little from the top and bottom. Close that window.

Right click on that same frame and choose "Copy"

Now, select all stills in timeline (Control a) and with them all selected, right click on any one of them (other than the first one) and choose "Paste event attributes"

It's quite easy to get the desired results by experimenting with the "New still image length" setting, pick one and then drag stills into timeline and play it to see if you need more or less frames, don't bother with the cropping yet. Change the length, play, undo, change the length again, undo etc until you get the desired effect. Once you're happy with the playback speed, apply your crop.

BruceUSA wrote on 9/7/2012, 12:48 PM

ddm,

I have thought about your method but I have not try it. I will have to give that a try when I got time.

I have tried batch resize in CS5, I resized to 4000x2248 when I import that as image sequence and I still can not crop to 16x9.

ddm wrote on 9/7/2012, 1:04 PM

I just tried it with 5500x3700 images with no issues.

Ian E Pearson wrote on 9/7/2012, 1:37 PM

I crop time image sequences all the time. Maybe you have the button that preserves the aspect ratio clicked.

richard-amirault wrote on 9/7/2012, 3:04 PM

Shooting still images at full resolution with most any digital camera gives you WAY more resolution than needed for HD video. I would reduce the resolution IN CAMERA as you shoot to ease your workflow and computer processing power.

john_dennis wrote on 9/7/2012, 9:29 PM

I tried my old habits at home and everything worked as expected in Vegas Pro 11-683.

BruceUSA wrote on 9/8/2012, 11:03 AM

I am still having problem importing still pic as Image Sequence because I got an error occurred while opening one or more file. The item was not found.

But I am able to do the hard way, by setting up the duration of the still image as 3 frame per image and I cropped 1 image to 16x9 then, copy and paste to the rest of the images.