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In this movie, we are going to look at importing image sequences. Now that's
done just the same way as we import video, but the concept of image sequences
may be a little foreign to you if you are new to video.
Let's go ahead and double-click this background to open up the Open File dialog box,
and go to the Media folder in the Exercise Files folder and open up the
green screen sequence folder. So, we know that video is just a series of still
images called frames. So what I did here is I exported every single
frame of the video to a different image. Let's go ahead and import this and I'll show
you what I'm talking about. If you have a big image sequence like this,
you could simply click on the first image and then check Image Sequence down at
the bottom and it will understand that this is a series of images, basically
frames that need to be put back together into video form.
So I click on Open. So then I need to select the Frame Rate which I can do from
this drop-down here or manually input my own frame rate. I'm going to leave
this at 30 frames per second. That's what FPS stands for and go ahead and click OK.
Now if I go to the Window menu and open up the Animation panel, which we'll be
talking a lot about in detail here. But if I scrub this playhead you will see this
actually has the appearance of video, but as you saw before it's not video,
it just a series of JPEGs. As I mentioned before there is a lot of reasons
for that. Number one, it's easier to break up and work with a lot
of times in video. Video can get huge, many gigabytes, but if we have a series of
images then we can group those, maybe back them up to a DVD or whatever, in
groups rather than in one huge chunk. Also a lot of times as you are working with
video, there is a lot of compatibility issues. Sometimes taking video
from Mac to Windows or vice-versa doesn't work too well. Sometimes the different
means of compression can throw things in for a loop a little bit.
But when we are dealing with images everything understands JPEGs. There is not
like different types of JPEGs. A JPEG is a JPEG. Same thing with TIFF files or
Targa files and so image file formats are basically more compatible.
Almost every pro video application even Photoshop here can recognize image sequences
and then convert them into video to be edited and adjusted as if they were video.
As we'll talk about later in this training series even Adobe Bridge
understands and recognizes image sequences and allows you to preview them there.
I should also point out that most image file formats are accepted in Photoshop.
So if you are going to have a JPEG image sequence or a TIFF or Targa image
sequence, Bitmap image sequence and the list goes on. It may be an unusual idea
to get used to it first, but it's actually a very helpful technique and very widely used.