Still images
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Video usually means images in motion, but most productions also include stationary titles or graphics, and may include other types of still image as well.
The still images you can use in your movies include:
· All types of text captions and graphics, including scrolling credits and “crawled” messages.
· Photos or drawings stored in disk-based image files.
· Individual video frames obtained with the Frame grabber tool.
· “Disc menus” for DVD, BD and VCD authoring. These specialized images are covered here.
Any of these still image types can be treated in either of two ways, depending on which track you drop them onto in the Movie Window Timeline:
· To add a full-screen image with a solid background, add the image to the video track.
· To add an image so that it appears in your movie with a transparent background, superimposed over the clips on the video track, place it on the title track. To be used in this way, the image must be in either TIFF (tif) or PNG (png) format, with the transparent area defined by means of an alpha channel as this format allows.
Note: Studio provides an additional option, the overlay track, for adding your images to the Timeline. See Two-track editing for details.
The Album has separate sections for titles, bitmapped images and disc menus. All these resources are stored as separate files on your hard drive. You can also create titles and disc menus of your own in the Classic Title Editor or the Motion Titler and add them directly to your movie without first saving them as separate files. Similarly, still video frames can be added directly from the Frame grabber tool.
A full-screen image is one that is placed on the video track. It fills the entire screen, replacing the video. When the preceding video clip ends, Studio plays the still image clip. The visual effect is that the video ends, and is replaced by the graphic until the next clip begins.
An overlay image is one that is placed on the title track. It is superimposed on the current video clip, without replacing the video. The transparent area of the image must be defined by means of an alpha channel.
If you would like to assemble a quick slideshow of still images or video clips, you may want to take advantage of Studio’s Ripple Transition feature to quickly insert a chosen transition between each pair of clips or images.
Most of Studio’s plug-in video effects can be applied to still images. (The exceptions are effects like Speed that only make sense for moving video.)