I’ve just got a few more video editing questions for you all. Sorry if they’re not worded very well…
Will a photo (same resolution and size as video) in video form for ‘x’ seconds be smaller in file size than a video of the same length?
Can you add photos to videos on VirtualDub?
I was just thinking that if it isn’t as big in filesize, adding photos to videos would be a handy way to make movies long enough for particular songs. Then you could have longer movies but still with a relatively small file size.
If this is true, could someone please briefly tell me how to do it? (just briefly).
On a totally different topic, how do you combine portrait and landscape style videos into one movie like Ryan did? VirtualDub wouldn’t let me.
I can’t comment on how virtual dub works, but I can answer one of your questions.
If you put a still into a video, regardless of the image’s resolution (it’s going to be rendered up or down to the video’s res no matter what) that 5 seconds or whatever of video will be just as big as 5 seconds of any other video - assuming your working with uncompressed video.
When you compress the video - export it to Quicktime or Divx or Mpeg or whatever, the fact that there are still images - or more accurately, stretches of time where there is no motion or changes in the video image, the file size could be significantly smaller. This depends heavily on what type of compression you use - what type of video file you export to. Many video codecs do keyframing in the compression - where it doesn’t bother re-drawing the image or parts of the image if it doesn’t change. In some video editing programs, you can set how often the codec keyframes when you export the video. Keyframe more often: the video is smoother, keyframe in long intervals: you have a smaller file, but the motion-oriented scenes start looking like crap. There are other clever schemes in different codecs where having stills will help the end result be a smaller file.
It’s hard to predict (at least for me) how big your final file will be, so play around with exporting different types of files. But, know that still images usually will, but won’t necessarilly, help with your final output file size.
I think here is where you reach the limits of VirtualDub. As far as I am aware VirtualDub can only load AVI files, not image files… the only way to stick in an image would be to somehow convert it to a video first.
I don’t know of any program that would do this for each and every image, but I know there are programs which convert animated GIFs to videos… maybe that could work…