Video ImageMontage

Recently I worked on a video for the grand opening of the new remodeled theater at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. The purpose of the video was to kick-off the evening and at the end of the video transition to the performer of the evening, Kristen Chenowith.

I had access to about 200 images (no video) and pretty much had free reign to do what I wanted – just keep the energy UP! For this project I used Apple Final Cut Pro 6 and Motion 3. Most of the project was completed on a MacBook Pro.

The video was projected on a 50′x25′ super lightweight material that was to be removed in about one second at the end of the video to reveal Kristen Chenowith on stage.

The project was projected by playing a standard NTSC DVD – Widescreen. However, I created the project at 1280×720(HD) in case they decided to use a Blu-Ray player.

Final Cut Pro is a good tool but it’s not my favorite. It does require (in my configuration, anyway) a lot more rendering than Sony Vegas Pro or Adobe Premiere CS4 to playback in the timeline but since I was “round-tripping” with Motion it was the way to go in this case.

Motion is a very cool program and, in some ways, it’s easier to create something quickly than in After Effects. That being said, I still found myself working in ways similar to After Effects. Also, if you go the Final Cut Suite route, make sure you have enough RAM for the job. The stock MBP comes with 2 GB of RAM which was a problem with outputting the final render. Upgrade to 4 GB if you’re working in this configuration.

Here’s the video:

[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="http://www.memoirmedia.com/sccarts/sccarts_final.swf" width="480" height="310" targetclass="flashmovie"]

[/kml_flashembed]