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Still images
You can grab still images from video, as mentioned in the Frames & Fields article, but this page is about the opposite: incorporating existing still photos into a video.
There are various reasons you might want to do this: either out of necessity because you only have still photos available or simply for visual impact.
Capturing images
The first thing to do is get the photos you want to work with onto the computer. If your source is a digital camera there is little problem. If starting with actual photos then there are two routes.
- Scan
You can scan prints using a flat-bed scanner. Nearly all modern scanners produce very good quality and are easy to use. Some scanners offer transparency adaptors as optional extras for scanning slides and negatives. If you have one of these you probably don't need us to tell you how to use it.
- CD
If you know you want to use your photos on the computer when you get them developed, you can have them put onto Kodak PhotoCD or the newer, cheaper Picture CD. These give extremely high-quality images and are a very convienent medium for using with a computer.
Image size and quality
The resolution of a video picture is much lower than a still image, so achieving the finest possible resolution in your image files is not necessarily important (but see Moving over the image below). However, a clean image with good contrast and well-defined color (unless monochrome) will help produce a good end-result.
For overall quality, 35mm film processed to CD is almost always best. Few, if any, digital cameras are as good. Scanned prints give surprisingly good quality, surpassing a lot of the cheaper digital cameras.
Using images
There are many ways you can incorporate still photos into a video. The obvious is to display a still instead of a video clip. But you can do many other things such as pan and/or zoom over the image giving an impression of motion, use a picture-in-picture effect of a small still inserted into a video, create a moving montage of several stills, or many other things limited only by your imagination!
You may be limited by what your editor software can do; everything described here is possible using Ulead MediaStudio Pro.
Fitting the image to the video
It is very unlikely that you will want to display the contents of an image file directly as a video frame. To start with the dimensions will probably be unwise. Video frames have an aspect ratio of 4:3 (ignoring wide-screen), but your images may be different, the exception being the majority of digital cameras which also use 4:3.
However, most photos benefit from some cropping, so you need to use the feature of your video editor that allows you to control which part of your image is displayed in the video frame. In MediaStudio Pro this is the Moving Path feature (even if you don't want the image to move). If your editor doesn't give you this sort of control you may need to use a separate image editor and save an image file cropped to 4:3, which you can import into the video.
Image distortion
Images are always displayed on a PC screen using square pixels. All image file formats also use square pixels. This means that if an image is for example 640 x 480 pixels, it will display at an aspect ratio of 4:3.
The same is not always true of video frames. For example the DV format is 720 x 480 for NTSC and 720 x 576 for PAL, but in both cases the final image when rendered on a TV is 4:3. When these frames are displayed on a computer (e.g. in a preview windows while editing) they are usually slightly distorted - NTSC is horizontally stretched, and PAL is horizontally squashed.
When a still image with square pixels is incorporated the different pixel shape must be allowed for, otherwise the image will be distorted the opposite way when shown on a TV. Some editors are smart enough to compensate automatically, others require you to do it manually. One way of doing the latter is to save copies of all your images "pre-distorted" to the equivalent of your video format. Use an image editor to stretch or squash the images horizontally, and use these copies to import into the video. Stretch by a ratio of 720/640 if working in NTSC, or squash by 720/768 if using PAL.
Moving over the image
A still photo can almost come to life if you make the video pan across or zoom in or out on it. Panning can work well on a wide-angle shot of landscape, a zoom is effective on shots like "Me standing in front of the Taj Mahal." Start zoomed in on the figure, then pull back to reveal the whole context.
For these effects, a high resolution image is important because only a small part is used to fill the frame. The exact technique again depends on your editor. In MediaStudio Pro you use the same Moving Path feature that you use to crop an image, so it's a simple step from stationary to moving images.
Picture-in-picture
This is almost the opposite of the idea above. A small frame containing the image or part of it appears over the main video. Superimposing multiple images this way gives a montage effect, where you may want to dispense with the background altogether. In both cases the images can be static or moving.
Again, the exact technique in MediaStudio Pro is just another application of the Moving Path feature. Working with multiple images will normally require use of a separate overlay track for each one.
With this technique the final images will be a lot smaller than the video frame, so you can afford to start with lower resolution image files. Avoiding the use of files with unnecessarily high resolutions not only saves disk space, but also saves the editor program from needing as much memory. It also will generally speed up the rendering process.
Summary
Incorporating still photos into a video can enhance both the video and the photos, and there are endless possiblities to explore. This article has concentrated on suggestions for photographs, but other sorts of images, such as clip-art or graphic designs, can be given similar treatment. |
