Creating Photomontages
with Canopus Imaginate
A few weeks ago, I was called by a local customer who was looking for someone to make a video montage for the funeral of her four-year-old niece. I told her to bring all the pictures she had and we would be happy to help. She asked that the photos be played over two specific songs with a simple title at the end. Together the two songs totaled about ten minutes in length and sadly, the family only had about 40 photos. They were very concerned at how the finished product would turn out with so few photos.
I decided that instead of simply dissolving from one still photo to the next, I would take some extra time and use Canopus' Imaginate. The photos had already been scanned and were on a CD-ROM, but they were nowhere near ready for video. So I opened the photos in PhotoShop and made sure each photo was color corrected and all major defects like red-eye, scratches, and excessive graininess were fixed. At that point, I cropped each photo to landscape orientation (using the rubber stamp where necessary to fill in the back ground). Once I was satisfied with all the photos, I took them one at a time into Canopus' Imaginate.
Imaginate is the perfect tool for turning still photos into high-quality video masterpieces. In Imaginate you start by importing a still image into a project and then animate the picture by moving the camera over the image. Moving the camera is more intuitive than moving the image around so setting up each shot is easy. For this project, I was able to bring each photo to life by creating subtle zooms and pans for every photo. This added more visual appeal to the photos that would hold the viewers interest longer. With Imaginate's simple interface and keyframeable timeline, it was possible to create visual masterpieces from still pictures easily (and quickly).
Once I finished creating all of the Imaginate files, I opened them up as clips in Premiere and put them in a storyboard. It was then no problem to automatically put them all to the timeline with a dissolve transition overlapping each photo animation. After just a few minutes of tweaking, the project was done and we ran the project out to VHS and DVD for the customer. After viewing the video, they were extremely pleased and genuinely amazed at the finished product that was completed in just a couple of hours.
If you are in the business of creating photo montages and are not using Canopus Imaginate then you are seriously missing out on some creative possibilities. The image animation capabilities that I have found built into most editing applications do not come close to the ease-of-use and the high-quality output of Imaginate. Imaginate can be used as a stand-alone program but it also comes with a plugin for Premiere and Canopus' own editing applications.
After you launch the Imaginate main interface you'll see two monitor-type screens and a timeline. The left-most window shows the picture and the virtual camera. The right window shows the actual virtual camera's output in realtime. The timeline allows you to set keyframes for position, scale, and rotation. The first thing that you'll want to do is specify the duration of your project and then import the image that you want to animate. Imaginate will allow you to import graphic files of almost any format and supports large file sizes as permitted by the RAM in your system. You want to make sure that your image is big enough that you don't need to zoom in more than 100%. If this is not possible, don't worry too much because Imaginate does have excellent interpolated quality.
Once you've created your animation inside of Imaginate you can export the file as an AVI file to any codec found on your system. My preferred method is to open the Imaginate project file directly into Adobe Premiere. Each Imaginate project file is self-contained with the actual image and motion settings. Premiere reads the file just as if it were any other type of clip. The nice thing about this is that you can easily put transitions between different animations. In addition, if you need to adjust the duration of the animated clip the keyframes are automatically adjusted so you'll always get the highest-quality finished video. The Imaginate clips do have to be rendered, but they render quickly.
I feel that Imaginate is a huge benefit to anyone who works with still photos in their video work. Canopus has designed a product that is easy to use, is compatible with any Premiere-based editing solution, and offers its own stand-alone capability. At a price of less than $200, I highly recommend this product. |
