Editing Your Stop Motion Movie

Editing Stop Motion Using Premiere Pro

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Editing Stop Motion using Premiere Pro (Written using CS4) 1. Launch Premiere Pro 2. Select New Project

3. Give your project a file name and location and change Capture Format to HDV 4. Click OK

Last Updated 5/6/2009

Editing Stop Motion Using Premiere Pro

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5. Starting in the first tab choose the HDV 1080p24 preset, give the sequence a name.

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Editing Stop Motion Using Premiere Pro

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6. Then in the next tab choose the HDV 1080p editing mode, 23.976 frames per second . 7. Click OK.

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Editing Stop Motion Using Premiere Pro

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8. Premiere Pro will load everything up and present you with a screen similar to this:

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Editing Stop Motion Using Premiere Pro

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9. DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP!! There’s one more key stage before you start importing and that’s to set the default duration of a still image, otherwise you will have to change every photo after import. Go to Edit > Preferences > General… and you’ll get the screen below.

10. Now find the Still Image Default Duration (above, highlighted) and change it to what you want it to be. I use 2 frames so that my animations are 12 photos per second for a 24 frames per second video. (Each photo has a duration of 2 frames)

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Editing Stop Motion Using Premiere Pro

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Summary of the Workspace The below image shows all the major sections of the workspace. The instructions that follow will reference these areas.

Importing Double-Click in the Project Palette. You will be presented with a dialog box for you to choose the directory where your images reside. To import images, you can also choose File>Import, right-click project palette and choose ‘import’, or drag a file or folder from Explorer into the Project Palette. Two ways to import: A sequence. Select one image and check ‘numbered stills’ when importing. Premiere creates a sequence out of all photos. NOTE: If you are using Green Screen, this is the method you will use! Individual Images. Select the group of images that you want to import and click OK.

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Editing Stop Motion Using Premiere Pro

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Once it’s all imported it’s time to drag all your photos into the timeline, this is as simple and selecting them all (Ctrl Click or Shift Click to select many) and dragging them into the Video 1 Timeline. Premiere Pro will then go through creating thumbnails which can take a little while depending on how many there are.

If you find that your photos are a tiny block on your timeline you can zoom in using the highlight slider or use the keyboard shortcuts for Zoom In (=) and Zoom Out (-). The red line above your photos in the Timeline means that playback hasn’t been rendered and won’t display at best quality. To render just press Enter on your keyboard. This dialog box will then come up while it renders it files and saving the created file(s) to your scratch disk.

By default Premier Pro plays everything once rendering is complete, if not then select the Canvas palette and press the Spacebar. Now that you’ve seen it it’s time to edit it.

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Editing Stop Motion Using Premiere Pro

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Editing Now what sort of editing you’ll do is really down to taste but I’ll tell you the basics of changing things and moving them around on the Timeline. We’ve already come across dragging things, but now it’s time to learn a bit about different sorts of editing. Overwrite Edit This is the default form of editing; if you drag something or copy and paste it, it will overwrite what’s after it to fit itself into the Timeline. Insert Edit Instead of overwriting something an insert edit simply moves what comes after it out of the way to fit into the Timeline. When you’re dragging you can hold Ctrl to achieve this, or if you have something copied you use Ctrl + Shift + V to insert paste it.

Ripple Delete A Ripple Delete (Alt + Backspace or Shift + Delete) will remove the video and close the gap. You can use the extra Video Tracks to apply Video Transitions from the Effects palettes to your video, because individual photos represent a frame or two you can’t apply transitions directly to them, instead I use a black PNG image file and drag it into Video Track 2. Then I stretch it out and apply a Video Transition such as Cross Fade so that it fades out and acts like a traditional fade in or out. Remember when dragging something into another video track to use the default Overwrite edit. Keep rendering your work (Enter) so you can play it back and see how it plays out.

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Editing Stop Motion Using Premiere Pro

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Audio As with importing images I just drag in the folder containing all my sound effects to the Project palette. And again it’s just about dragging the effects you want to where you want them on the Timeline, same editing techniques apply with Insert Edits and Ripple Deletes. Use the directional keys when using the Timeline to advance one frame at a time or Shift + directional keys to advance 5 frames and to be accurate with your timings, once the playhead is at the right point drag your audio and by default it will Snap to the playhead. You could change the window layout to Audio by going through Window > Workspace > Audio but owing to the nature of loads of differently sourced SFX my tracks have wildly differing levels so I use Clip > Audio Options > Audio Gain… and change all instances of a particular effect to the same level. This is the Audio Gain window, if your sound is maxing out the levels at 0 dB then you should Set Gain to -6db. But sound isn’t that simple so if there are lots of other sounds you will need to lower it to below 6dB so all the sounds don’t push it over -6db.

Once you’re happy with how it looks and sounds it’s time to Export it.

Exporting 1. Go File > Export > Media… to bring up the Export Settings dialog box. Now in this tutorial I’m going to presume you want to export a 1080p version .

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1080p So let’s start with the high quality version, we could of course just whack all the settings to highest and leave it at that, but after a while you won’t see the difference and will end up with a huge file that might crash your video player. So first I set it to use the H.264 Format then give it an Output name, which also sets the destination and then: Video Tab • TV Standard: PAL video • Frame Width & Height: 1920 x 1080 pixels • Frame Rate: 23.976 • Pixel Aspect Ratio: Widescreen 16:9 • Bitrate Encoding: VBR, 1 Pass • Target Bitrate: 20 Mbps (keep an eye on the estimated file size) • Max Bitrate: 20 Mbps Audio Tab • Codec: AAC • Output Channels: Stereo • Frequency: 48 kHz • Audio Quality: High • Bitrate: 128 (more if you reckon you can hear the difference) •

The items I haven’t listed I don’t fully understand and wouldn’t want to mislead you to believing I have the settings correct but they should be fine by default.

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Click Ok and it will load Adobe Media Encoder and queue it.

Once you’ve done everything there’s nothing left but to click the Start Queue button and go find something else to do, how long it will take depends on your computer, the length of the video and the settings. When it’s finished have a look at the outputs and hopefully they’ll be lovely. If not I can’t be of much help because I can’t troubleshoot it for you.

Last Updated 5/6/2009