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Old November 23rd, 2009, 08:24 AM   #1
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Importing too many stills into Premiere?

Hi all,

I'm trying to import 2600 still images into Premiere CS4 as an image sequence. The stills are sequentially numbered TIFFs, 1920 x 1080 and around 7Mb each. However, Premiere will only let me import about 1200 of them. When I try selecting them all it says the image sequence is too large. Is there any way around this? As I don't want to have to re-export in a two-step process and lose image quality. Thanks.

Rob
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Old November 23rd, 2009, 08:47 AM   #2
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While I don't know what the limit for stills in PP is, 2600 is a big number. You may want to break the sequence into two or more segments and create two different projects. Yes it's more work and counterintuitive, but PP is that way sometimes.
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Old November 23rd, 2009, 08:41 PM   #3
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I discovered that the problem was image # 01219 was missing, so it was causing an error. Using huge image sequences (as opposed to video files) is quite common in film work. They probably import possibly tens of thousands at a time. Anyway problem solved :)
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Old November 24th, 2009, 11:34 AM   #4
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Well, A) It's not all that common, and B) they're not using Premiere, most likely.

Premiere hates stills, especially big ones, especially if there are a lot of them. Caveat Emptor.
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Old November 24th, 2009, 04:31 PM   #5
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I beg to differ. Maybe film professionals are not likely to be using Premiere, but many animators do, and I for one, have been using Premiere with tiff and targa sequences much larger than 2600 frames for years. Obviously it's going to put a much bigger strain on the program, especially if we're talking about high-rez images, and my personal experience with Premiere is that Jpeg's cause much more problems and crashes than tiff, tga and psd's.

I admit that in many cases I prefer treating image sequences in After Effects, and exporting to QT Animation or AVI Lagarith/Uncompressed for final editing in Premiere...
But I would NOT rule out working with long image sequences in Premiere if it's what suits your workflow best.

cheers.
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Old November 25th, 2009, 02:48 AM   #6
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Hi Rob,

I didn't realize folks were bringing in pix bigger than about 2MB JPEGs for most HD work.

I'm curious - what type of output would require such huge files per frame? And what camera will you be using for the rest of your footage? Thank goodness you're only going to transcode about 2 minutes of video, otherwise transcoding your raw TIFFs would take a loooong time.

Regards, Michael
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Old November 28th, 2009, 09:45 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam Gold View Post
Well, A) It's not all that common, and B) they're not using Premiere, most likely.[/I]
A lot of idependent filmmakers process and edit using image sequences. A lot of them use Premiere. Pixar or LucasFilm probably don't use Premiere on any regular basis I'm sure.

If you've ever rendered out a scene that takes a month+ to render, you'd understand why you render to stills instead of a video file.
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Old November 28th, 2009, 10:05 PM   #8
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Michael, Since this was a short sequence and I wanted the highest quality possible I went with a TIFF format. In many circumstances it would be fine to use very high quality JPEG files, if you're not running a ton of operators on the film and the delivery format isn't critical. But remember that you tend to lose color information with JPEG. And also, if you're doing a lot of processing and re-rendering, JPEG artifacts tend to propagate and become more pronounced down the line. TIFF and Targa also have the advantage that they will allow you to work with alpha channels if you need to. For me the rule is I use TIFF or Targa as space will allow.

Last edited by Rob Johnson; November 29th, 2009 at 09:53 AM.
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