I decided to write a more full featured tutorial for this week after missing last week and thought a good subject to cover would be making a stop motion animation in Premiere Pro which is also pretty similar to Final Cut Pro so if you know what to do in Premiere Pro you can apply your knowledge to FCP.

In this tutorial I’m going to presume you have all the photos you need, this isn’t about animating, this is about putting it together in a video program and exporting it for viewing and uploading to Vimeo (who let you upload one 720p video each week).

Before getting started in Premiere Pro you’ll need to have taken your photos, copied them onto your computer and (in this tutorial) made them 1920 x 1080. I do this because 1080p is the best HDTV resolution you can get and also because on its lowest setting my camera takes 1920 x 1200 pixel photos so it’s easy to batch resize all my photos. To find out more about Photoshop Actions read Quick Look #5.

Setting up

Okay, now it’s time to load up Premiere Pro. I’m using CS4 but that shouldn’t effect anything we’ll be using really. Once loaded click New Project, which brings up this screen.

Give your project a file name and location and change Capture Format to HDV (we won’t be capturing but I like to do this anyway). The other tab deals with scratch disks: where Premiere Pro saves captured footage and its render files so it’s useful to have a fast hard drive with plenty of free space on it. Then click Ok.

Starting in the first tab choose the HDV 1080p24 preset, give the sequence a name, then in the next tab the preset should have set most things up but make sure it’s using the HDV 1080p editing mode, 23.976 frames per second and everything else should be fine. The third tab isn’t important as it’s easier to just add new tracks as you need them.

Then Premiere Pro will load everything up and present you with this screen, it won’t be exactly the same as I’ve resized some of my windows, which you can do my grabbing the corner of any of the palettes and making them the size you want.

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.

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.

Notes

• HDV Capture Format
• HDV 1080p24, HDV 1080p, 23.978 fps
• Edit > Preferences > General… change Still Image Default Duration

Workspace

I’m just going to quickly go over the various areas in the Premiere Pro workspace so you know what I mean when I say timeline or canvas.

Importing

When you’re using Premiere Pro or any other video editor there are always three ways of doing things, the right click method, the menu method and another method usually some form of dragging. And that’s no different when it comes to importing. You can choose File > Import, right click in the Project palette and choose ‘Import…’ or drag the file or folder in from Explorer/​Finder into the Project palette.

I chose to drag the folder containing my photos in from Explorer, Premiere Pro will tell you it’s Importing (above) and then they’ll appear in the Project palette along with any other assets your project uses.

It’s always useful to keep this organised so you can find things quickly, you can do this by creating Bins (folders) for each sort of asset, such as Stills, Video and Sound.

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 Premiere 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.

Notes

• Importing — File > Import, right click Import, drag and drop on Project palette
• Organise your Project palette with Bins, right click New Bin
• Drag files from Project palette into the Timeline to create your animation
• = Zoom In
• - Zoom Out
• Enter - Render
• Space — Play

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.

Clear

The same applies to deleting, the default delete or ‘Clear’ (Backspace or Delete) will remove the video from the Timeline but leave behind a gap where it was.

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.

Beyond that I can’t tell you much more, once you’re happy with it we can add some sound to it.

Notes

• Insert Edit — Ctrl Drag or Ctrl + Shift + V to insert paste
• Ripple Delete — Alt + Backspace or Shift + Delete
• Enter — Render

Audio

Sound effects makes animations come alive so it’s important to find the right effects (or make your own). Currently I’m just making short Army men animations using Google to search for various gun and explosion sound effects that are free, whilst you might be paying for excellent quality royalty free sound effects. But the methods are the same either way.

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.

If you download your sound effects from various places like me you might find that some sound effects can’t go in Audio Tracks with other effects, this is because they are not the same format, such as 5.1 Surround, Stereo or Mono etc. I just create as many tracks as necessary to layer my sound and create a rich atmosphere.

To create the correct sort of Audio Track just drag your sound file below all the other Audio Tracks on the Timeline and let go, Premiere Pro will automatically create the right track.

After a while I ended up with this; lots of sound effects and tracks.

Now it’s time to correct the Audio Levels to conform with TV regulations. I was taught to keep all sounds TV Safe at –6 dB, this way it also prevents any sounds from distorting as indicated by the colour of the Audio levels in the Audio Levels palette.

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. Sometimes sounds are even louder than can be shown, it’s all a matter of experimenting to see how loud each sound is.

There are Audio Transitions to in the Effects palette, I always use the Constant Gain transition and adjust the size of it to what I need.

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

Notes

• Left and Right keys — Move the playhead one frame in the Timeline
• Shift + Left/​Right — Move the playhead five frames in the Timeline
• –6db —  TV Safe Audio Broadcast
• Window > Workspace > Audio
• Clip > Audio Options > Audio Gain… to change sound audio levels

Exporting

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 and a Vimeo ready 720p version. With the Adobe Media Encoder we can queue up our render orders and get them all done before leaving our computer to render them.

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.

Click Ok and it will load Adobe Media Encoder and queue it, then File > Export > Media… and we’ll do the Vimeo one.

720p Vimeo Ready

Okay, if you take a look at the Vimeo recommended settings you will see they’re using a Mac but you get the idea of what you need.

So in the Export Settings box you should use H.264, give it a name and destination and then:

Video Tab

• TV Standard: PAL video
• Frame Width & Height: 1280 x 720 pixels
• Frame Rate: 23.976
• Pixel Aspect Ratio: Widescreen 16:9
• Bitrate Encoding: VBR, 1 Pass
• Target Bitrate: 5 Mbps (or less)
• Max Bitrate: 5 Mbps (or less)

Audio Tab

• Codec: AAC
• Output Channels: Stereo
• Frequency: 48 kHz
• Audio Quality: High
• Bitrate: 128

Click Ok and it will be added to the Media Encoder, make sure the file names are different otherwise it will overwrite what it just rendered. Though this can be change in the Media Encoder itself.

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.

All that’s left is to upload it to Vimeo, but I don’t really need to tell you how as it’s all quite self-​​explanatory on the Vimeo website.

Thanks

Thanks for reading it all, hope it was useful, drop me a comment if you think I’ve made a mistake or have something else to say. You can see the animation I was working on in the tutorial on Vimeo.