Pallian Creative

Software
1. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4
2. Adobe PhotoShop CS4
3. Fission

Now that I had the necessary gear to shoot and edit, all I had to do was shoot! And that is exactly what I did all day Christmas day. My girlfriend’s family was kind and patient enough to let me be the spy on the wall. I think I shot over 5000 photos that day, 1500 of which are on this video. I shot the photos is full 12.3 megapixel resolution - my 8GB memory card took a beating, and I had to import the photos over to my laptop every 1000 photos or so.

Here comes the technical part - for those of you interested in making one of these videos for yourself.

Having never made a stop motion video before, I spent a few days searching all kinds of online forums trying to find the best software that would do the trick. I didn’t have final cut pro and had no intentions of buying it, and iMovie did not have the capabilities. So I started looking around for Adobe products, and spend a good week learning both Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. At the end, Adobe Premiere felt like the right choice. I didn’t need a lot of effects for this video, and premiere was so much more easier to navigate.

I followed the basic tutorials Adobe provided HERE and got myself acquainted with Premiere enough to feel confident to start editing. First thing I did was go to the Preferences and change the settings of the still image default duration to 3 frames. This gave me just the right speed for the video. Time-lapse photographers may want to play around this setting first to get the best transition.

Once that was taken care of, I organized the photos into different folders. Each folder represented a shot and had had approx 80-100 photos. I then used the magic of Photoshop’s Batch Processing and re-sized the photos from 4000px to 1280px wide. This dramatically decreased the file size but still maintained a good enough quality to make a HD video.

Next, I imported these photos (with the folders) to Premiere and dragged them to the stage in sequential order. Since the photos were all in the right order and inside the numbered folders, it was a pretty quick process. I used Fission to cut up 2 songs and added them to the stage as well. A few tweaks later, the video was ready for exporting.

Here are the settings I used to export:
Format: H.264
Preset: HDTV 720p 23.976 High Quality
Keyframes: Every 30 frames
Data rate: 5000 kbits/sec
Audio: 44.100 kHz

And that was it! Below is the finished version. I have a few more ideas I want to try out next - so do check back for future videos. If you have any questions on stop motion or on any of the above - feel free to email me or add your comments below.

To watch the video below in HD - CLICK HERE.

PS: If you noticed the artwork around the house, please check out my gf’s mom’s amazing work HERE.