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Lesson Info

Motion & Animation: Movement With Still Images

So let's bring in some images, talk about the challenges, the variety of images here of all different sizes. I already imported them and I'm actually going to just show you how to work with pictures in the Media Browser. We saw the briefly in an earlier lesson, but if you go to the Media Browser, and I'll bring this full screen, and we're gonna look at our, where we have some photographs. Okay, so the nice thing is we have all these images, and I wanna explain this interface. This is very similar with, as I said, the Browser and the Project tab. You'll notice a couple of things. If you look closely, I'm gonna zoom in not only on the image, but also make these pictures bigger. I can see the image, and then I see a duration underneath them, and it's four seconds 29 frames. Let's round that off to five seconds. That's a default duration that you would set in the preferences. So when you import of course video, it's whatever the duration is. A photograph, our graphic, will come in and will...

be a default duration that you would set in the preferences, and the default here is five seconds. Now, realize, once you bring it in, you can make it longer, you can make it shorter, just like with the video, it's non-destructive. You're never modifying your original image. So that's why you see this at five seconds. If you know that you want 10 seconds for each shot, I would change the preferences before you ingest it. So, here's the nuance. I don't wanna say it's a trick. Whatever the duration is when you ingest it, it stays that duration in your project file. If you change the preference and ingest some more pictures, they are the duration of the new ones. The old ones don't change, okay? It doesn't go back and... I mean that's not a bad thing or a good thing. It's just a thing. So don't think that, "Oh, I change the preference, "now all my images are gonna be longer or shorter." And again, you're never stuck. They're very flexible. So if I'm gonna go ahead and bring these images in, I'm gonna zoom back out, and I have some images. I wanna dig a little bit deeper into our project window. We saw earlier that you can look at this as a list or as icons. I wanna look at this as a list. And this again is one of those things that can be very confusing to everybody, media start, media end, duration. These are all different pieces of metadata. That's like the buzzword of the 2015, '16 era. It's all the data about the data of your images and your video. So, if you're work in photography, it's the x of information. It's aperture, shutter speed, frame size, pixel aspect ratio. In video, it could also be the Kodak. It could be whether you, in this case, am I using this in my show, where I'm using it in my show how long is it from the in to the output. A lot of this, I don't want you to worry about now. What I do want to focus on is this column here, the video info, and this is specific to the photos we're bringing. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna grab this, and I should be able to drag that across, there we go, next to my pictures. So I grab the right thing. I grabbed duration. Let's go ahead and grab Video Info. I was just illustrating that you could drag any column. And by the way, if you double click on the top, you can sort by any column. So, what we see here, and I'll zoom in a little bit so it's a little easier. This is the size of all these images. Now these are all, I'm pretty sure, JPEGs, but look at this. This one is 1920 by 1080, so I've already sized this one to fit. Let me make this column a little bit wider. Okay, there we go. So, it's telling me, once it's in, a lot of detail about my image. Some of these are the raw image, not the raw image, but the original size, 6000 by 4000, that's 24 megapixels. That's gonna be huge when I bring it in. But I wanna show you the diversity of these and what happens in side. This one down here is a square, I can tell that. The aspect ratio is a box. It's 3559 by 3559. So, these are all different sizes, and I wanna show you how we would deal with them, and how we're gonna leverage scaling in the Motion tab to adjust for this and work with these images. So let's go ahead and zoom back out, and turn these into lovely little icons. I can hit the icon thing, and step inside in a sequence. There are my photos, step inside. Remember, I can scale them up to see them better. So this is a hodgepodge of things. They'll all look about the same size inside your bin. It's not gonna have the small ones small and big ones big, because you wanna see them all, but you can see they have different aspect ratios, and we know for instance that some of these were 4000 by 6000. So, when I bring these into my timeline, you're gonna see the challenge that you will initially face, and you're gonna find out how easy it is to fix it. Okay, so let's go back to the original layout. I have a sequence. I made this the standard 1920 by 1080. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna go ahead and make a new sequence just so we can revisit that. I'll revisit things throughout all the lessons, because then it will stick. We learned actually the keyboard shortcut for a new sequence is just like making a new Word document, Command or Control + N. This is our standard dialog box. It remembered what we did before, which was 1080. And we talked through an earlier lesson about frame rate. I generally like to work at 30 frames per second. It's just a more of a standard. But if you're combining it with other footage that you shot at 24, you may wanna keep your whole sequence at 24, and that's absolutely fine, really that's the objective. While we're in here, this is standard high def. Some of you may have heard the term 720p when we're dealing with high def. And 720p is another high def format, but the frame size is a little different. It's 1280 by 720. It's a smaller frame size, and that's still considered high def. Channels actually use it. The reason they have both is because being smaller, they use less bandwidth to broadcast it or to send it across the cable, and even to store it. So sometimes they say, "Well, it looks good. "and the TVs automatically figure it out." So if you here 720, it's just a smaller size. If you're gonna be delivering a lot of different sizes, again, make your video as big as possible, and then change the size when you export it. Make a 1920 version I'm sorry, a 1080 version an a 720 version, even smaller. So you always should try to build it as large a you think you're going to deliver it, because it will scale down better than scale up. Okay? And the new ultra high definition televisions that you see advertised. All the big-box stores have them now. They are like four high def TVs in one. They're that double ratio that I talked about, that by 2160 pixels. So if you wanna future proof, maybe you wanna make your sequence that big. That puts a big strain on your computer. It's a lot of pixels to push, but that just gives you a little perspective. And you always wanna make a new sequence from scratch when you're working with pictures, instead of dropping the picture and having it create it, and I've seen photographers do this. They'll drop in an image that 3000 by 2000, and now the size of their sequence is 3000 by 2000, which is necessarily what you wanna deliver and you're making your work a lot harder. And if you wanna do any kind of movement, you didn't give yourself any luxury of space. So, we're gonna go ahead, make this 1080p. We have our new sequence. I'm gonna zoom out. And I'm gonna pull in some of these images that are non-traditional sizes. Now, I did know that one of them was a perfect fit. I'm gonna actually go ahead and double check what that is. I'm gonna go to my list. I'm gonna sort these by size. And if you notice, I'll show you that some are perfect fit. The Shanghai one is a perfect, 1920, we'll bring that in first. I have one that's smaller that we'll deal with, and most of the other ones are bigger. So let's go ahead, I'm gonna double click to load this into the source monitor. So, this one I scaled exactly. So if I drop this in, and I'm gonna go ahead and hit the backslash key so it fills the frame. It's a perfect fit. It looks exactly the way I wanted it to, and it's five seconds long. If I wanted to make it shorter or longer, I can just grab that trim and make it shorter or longer. I can also right click on it and change its duration or even just load it into my source monitor and change duration. Lots of different ways. Drag and drop is usually the easier and trimming. But what about an image that's larger? Okay. I'm gonna actually jump and go to one of the crazy large ones, which is 6000 by 4000. So this is the... I like this one, this is a pretty shot. This is a Boston Long Wharf. This was a night shot. I love doing night stuff. So, when I look in the source monitor, I see the whole picture. When I bring it into my sequence, I do not see the whole picture. It is giving me a one to one pixel. Because it's large, it's showing me pixels by 920 by 1080. We'll be fixing all these numbers in post. No, they won't. I'll be correcting them myself. It let's you see the whole image. So I need to scale this. There's a couple ways that you can achieve this. There is a very quick way to make it fit, but, remember, the aspect ratio is different. So if I bring in a picture, and I wanna just make it fit immediately, I can right click on the image in my sequence, and there is an option down here that says, Set to Frame Size and Scale to Frame Size. You pretty much wanna use the second one, Set to Frame Size. This is actually newer. It really is scaling, but they've already used that as a legacy term. Scale to frame size will just automatically rasterize the picture, throw away some pixels, and make it fit perfectly, and it will look like it's 100%. But if you wanna do any kind of move on it, you've lost some resolution. If you choose Set to Frame Size, let me visually show you what happens, and then I'll show you what happens under the hood. Okay, it scales it down to whatever size it needs to, to show the entire image. Okay. So, instead of making to, it fills the frame, it says, "I wanna see everything." and this is a different aspect ratio. Okay. So, it did that, but what is the happening under the scene or behind the scenes? Well, we're gonna take a look in our Effects Control tab, and this is where we're gonna be working throughout this lesson for motion and scaling. What it's done is it actually scaled it down to 28% of its original size, so it will fit. Okay. I didn't have to do any math, that's the beauty of it. It scaled it down, it fits. And when I export, whatever size I export, it'll be as sharp as it can be. And since I'm scaling smaller, it's gonna stay sharp. I wanna just pop back here to our original image that's 1920 by 1080, and you can see that's at 100%, because it's a one-for-one and it fit perfectly. So, when you bring something in, and I'm gonna bring in another image, and before I change its size, and I'm gonna bring in something that's the square. Let's bring in something square. Yeah, it's relatively square. Is that square? This is where I like to do this. There we go. Now I can tell what's square and what's not. Not just numerical, I can pick a pretty picture. Okay, so this is the Jane hotel, full size. This is in lovely New York, one of my favorite cities right after Seattle and every place that all of you live. Okay. Let me go ahead and hit the minus key to bring this down a little bit, bring this into my sequence. Obviously, it's bigger. If I go over here and look at the Effects Control, it comes in 100%. As soon as I right click and I go Set to Frame Size, it will fit, it's a square image, and it's pillar boxed. So, this is where you have to make a decision of, "I'm making some sort of video "and I want to show my imagery. "Do I want to keep everything there "and maybe just put it over "a black background or a color background? "Or do I want to reframe it or do move on it?" because this is all bigger. If I kept this at 100%... It's 30% now, by the way. But if I kept that at 100%, I could go through, and we're gonna learn how to do that, I could go ahead and pan across and animate it, and I'm not losing any resolution. If this is too close, I don't have to have it at 100%. I could put it at 50%, and now I have a little more latitude, but I'm seeing the size. But the point is that probably you won't work with 50, or 100, or 30. You'll visually say, "I want this bigger, and smaller, and what not." and we're gonna learn how to do that. Question. Is there an easy way to make the image fill, instead of fit the frame without doing it manually. There is not an easy way, especially if you're dealing with a diversity of frame sizes. If everything is the same size, in other words, everything is naturally a four by three or two by three aspect ratio, you can actually create a motion favorite or a preset that will blow it up so it touches the edge. But there's nothing that says figure it out, which is why earlier I said sometimes I'll take things into Lightroom or Photoshop and do the cropping in there, because then I have full control and I might be faster there. You have a preset in both of those application that says, "Give me a 16 by nine crop." Boom, position, save, and then when you bring it in, you don't have to worry about it. But there's nothing that says, "Fill to the edges," because then it's gonna chop something off, and they just don't. It's interesting, when they design these applications, part of the thought is how can we make it so people don't get themselves into trouble. And so they try to make it more bullet proof so they lean towards showing them the whole image versus cropping it so it fits, and then somebody comes back and goes, "Why is it cutting of the head "of everybody I put in." because, you know. The quick answer is not by default, but you can make a preference, and I'm hoping we'll get an opportunity to do that, but they should all be the same size, as a matter of fact, I will make it a point to show you how to do that. Okay. Excellent. So, now we have kind of an understanding. The other things we need to consider, bring in another image. Again, this is vertical, not horizontal. I'm gonna go to Set to Frame Size. And so, portraits are gonna look a lot different than landscape. Television is landscape, right? It doesn't mean you have to do landscape, but you have to be aware that, "Okay, I may need to adjust this. "I may need to do a move on it. "I may want to leave it like that "so they can appreciate the entire image I have, "and how I chose to crop it and frame it." So these are decisions that you'll make, but the nice thing is that you can very quickly make it fit and work from there. So I've scaled it down. If I wanted to, I can go ahead and then go up here. We're gonna scale a couple of images. I can use the virtual slider or grab the slider here, and let me show you the effect of that on the image. So, I'm moving it to make it bigger. And the other thing you'll see, I'm gonna show you kind of the hard way to do it first, but there are times when I definitely do it this way. I can also move its position, it's XY position with these sliders. What I really wanna do is I'm gonna go ahead, and I just want to crop I at her waist and see her head, and then go ahead and make it big enough that it touches the edges of the frame. We'll go to Scale, just up that a little bit. Then we'll go here, and bring down the Y axis. So, I've positioned it, and maybe that's what I want. I wanna just leave it as a static image. If you notice, and you can't really see it, but I'm about 70% of the original size. So this is gonna be very sharp. So it's just something to keep in mind. So that's what I may do with the image inside of Premier. I could also do a move on this. I could do a tilt, tilt up or tilt down on a vertical image. I have a lot of flexibility, but it's just we need to start thinking when we're shooting our images, and a lot of this will also apply to video, because there will be instances where you're shooting something that gives you video that's a different size than traditional high definition television. GoPro cameras can shoot 4k, ultra high definition. You'll put it in, you'll need to scale it down to see it, or you can actually do a move on it. Earlier on when we looked at that interview footage that I told you I shot at 4K, I actually shoot a lot of video at this ultra high definition if I can, because then I can reframe it without losing any resolution, which really gives you a lot of control, something that photographers are used to and videographers are not, because we never had the luxury of all this resolution. So, everything that we're talking about with a still image, applies to video, but it's sometimes easier to digest in this environment. Yes. Is that something you're specifically going to go through the idea of taking something that you shot at 4k and reducing it down so that you have that alternative point of view? As a matter of fact, I will ingest the 4k. Some of you go thinking do I have this on this drive, I believe I do. If we do not get to it in this lesson, I promise to address it in our tips and tricks session. We'll look at everything else, because I think it is a very cool technique and we have the footage. As a matter of fact, let's save it for that and really get our hands around and heads around working with motion. So, it's a lot clearer now. Hopefully, you understand that resolution of images or photos, you have to really kinda deal with that. So, that's really the first thing that we're looking at, is that a lot of times you just wanna scale something, and you have the numerical controls here. It's underneath the Effects Control tab, and you need to make sure that the clip is selected. Okay, this is the trick. Make sure the clip is selected, make sure that the playhead is over the clip, so that way you're seeing what's going on. The got you is, the gotcha... Gotcha, gotcha. I gotcha, okay. If my playhead is here, and it's over her, when I click, this is highlighted, I actually have the... Actually, it did an update. It says preference right up there. Yeah, so it's updating when I placed it over. But if I have this selected, but the playhead over here, so this is the gotcha. This is the highlighted clip. This is what's loaded into here, even though my playhead is above this and I see that. And this is true when you're working with filters and color correction also. And I'm thinking, "Oh, I need to change this." When I start moving all these sliders and I see nothing is happening, and I get really frustrated, I jump over here, and look what I've done. I've actually moved this image. So, as a general rule of thumb, if nothing is selected, it's where playhead is part, and that's how you want it to be. The gotcha is this is selected no matter where the playhead is part, that's what's loaded in. Okay. It tries to highlight and load that. It's a preference that can accidentally be turned off, but that's just something to remember. Actually, in earlier versions of Premier, it didn't automatically do that. Now it does it by default, but it is a preference that you can turn off. So, let's really again explore how we're gonna scale an image. So, I'm gonna bring in one that I know is smaller. I'm trying to think of which one that was. It was the wine. So here's what happened if you bring in an image. Of course it's on black so it's hard to see, so let's actually kinda introduce the wonderful idea of layering so you can actually see it on the black background. If you notice, and this is again almost a picture in picture. I put this wine glass, and, by the way, it was something like 600 by 400, and I'm looking down, so that's on top, but it doesn't fill the screen, because it's a smaller resolution by default. If I needed to fill the screen, I can use the same technique. I want you to see what the size is. Here it is, 100%. Believe me, it's 100%. I don't need to zoom in to show you that, but I will zoom in once I Set to Frame Size. This actually enlarges the image, again, to the edges, making it 180% of its original size, but it fills the frame. And maybe that's more important, to fill the frame, than to have it get a little bit soft. The nice thing is that the same technology that we used for expanding or making an image larger in Photoshop, a lot of that has been transferred into Premier. So, scaling up stays fairly sharp. I've pushed things to 200%, and people don't really notice it if the original image is sharp enough. So, don't panic if you have to scale up. A lot of times you can get away with it, especially depending on the image. So that's three different situations, smaller, much larger, vertical, okay, the challenges that you're facing. Now, what if I want to scale this in a way different than going into these sliders. What I really wanna do is I want to adjust this visually, aesthetically. And to do that, I need to go into what's called like a wire frame mode where I can grab it move and it. As a matter of fact, folks in Photoshop, what is it, Command + T, Control + T is transform on the layer, and now you can start moving it around. It's gonna try not to change the aspect ratio, which is something in Photoshop. It will if you grab a corner, unless you hold down a shift key, because television normally doesn't want things distorted. Okay. So, if I want to go into a wire frame mode, there's two ways to get there. There is not a keyboard shortcut, okay. I can either click on the little box icon, and you'll find this in a variety of filters and effects, as well as in the Motion tab. So if I click on that, you will see there is a little bit of a blue bounding box. And once that is highlighted, I can actually grab this and move around. A quicker way of doing that if you're working with the top most layer, and I'm gonna go ahead and just jump over to another clip here, is if you double click on it, it will go into that mode automatically, but it is the top layer that you're grabbing. And the nice thing is now I can go ahead and grab this, and I can reposition it. If I grab a corner, I can scale it up. And as I indicated, unlike Photoshop, it will always constrain the aspect ratio by default. There are ways to break that, but generally you don't wanna do that in this environment. And this goes into showing you some other things you may want or need to know. It's a very touchy thing there. I was making it bigger, and you saw I could actually grab it and pull it outside the frame. It's hard to see sometimes what you're doing, especially when you're looking at any kind of motion or animation. Sometimes it's hard to see what you're doing, so there's a little dialog in the bottom left corner that says Fit, which automatically scale the image you're viewing, not actually scale the size and what's going out. So it just fits inside the frame that you see in that you see, and that's the default, but you do have the option to look at this smaller in the frame, which is what we're gonna do now, or larger. You may say, "Well, why do I wanna do larger?" Well, just like in Photoshop, sometimes you may wanna see if something is happening in the background, or I you need to grab a color from something, or mask something out. So you can look at things larger. This will not make the image larger on export, you're just looking at a greater magnification of your canvas. So if I hit 200, it's still the same size if we look over here, but now I can actually se the details. And you'll notice because this is so big, even zoomed in, we're seeing a lot of amazing detail because it's huge, which is why I like this shot. But on the flip side, if I go down to say 50% of it's size, and I'm gonna make it a little smaller so I can see all the edges, 25%, now I can go ahead and I can see the entire image's frame. And what I see in here is what the viewer sees in the final show, which is great because this allows me to start thinking about how I'm going to animate this, how I'm going to move through this because I can kinda see where my edges are. And this is great, especially if you have really large images. If I brought in one of those images that are like... This might be a large image, 6000, because that's pretty tight. It allows me to see what's outside. Let me do the same thing. I'm gonna double click on it, and you'll notice that I'm at 25%, but even a 10%, this is how large this image is. I have this much more real estate to work with. So you'll be jumping in and out of that.