Image sequences – Apple Motion 2 User Manual
Page 169
Chapter 2
Creating and Managing Projects
169
Still Image Duration
When you first import a still image into your project, it assumes a duration equal to the
current duration of your project. Increasing the duration of your project does not
automatically increase the duration of an image that’s already been imported. Still
images have infinite duration in Motion, so you can stretch them out in the Timeline to
be as long as you need. For more information about working with objects in the
Timeline, see “
Image Sequences
Numbered image sequences store video clips as individual still image files. Each image
file has a number in the filename that indicates where it fits into the sequence. In a film
clip that’s been digitally scanned, each file represents a single frame. In a video clip
that’s been converted to an image sequence, each file contains both fields of a single
video frame, with the upper and lower lines of the image saved together. Image
sequences use the same variety of file formats as still image files. Some of the most
popular formats for saving image sequences are: SGI, BMP, JPEG, TIFF, and TGA. Like still
image formats, many of these support alpha channels, which are automatically used by
Motion.
Because image sequences have been around for so long (before QuickTime, they were
the only way to store video on a computer), they remain the lowest-common-
denominator file format for exchanging video across many different editing and
compositing applications. While QuickTime is increasingly used to exchange video clips
between platforms, image sequences are still in common use, especially in film
compositing.
As with QuickTime video clips, you can mix image sequences of different formats, using
different frame sizes, pixel aspect ratios, frame rates, and interlacing. For more
information, see “
Important:
Any imported image sequence must contain three or more digits of
padding, for example, imagename.0001.tif.
Collapsing Image Sequences
The “Show collapsed image sequences” button at the bottom of the File Browser allows
you to display image sequences as a single object, rather than as the collection of
individual files that exist on your disk. Image sequences that you import into your
project in this way are treated as single objects everywhere they appear in your
project.
Click to collapse or
expand image.
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