NLE's suitable for animating jpegs?
 

As part of a broader project I have to shoot 30 seconds of animation. The individual frames are hand drawings and in JPEG format. Can you folks recommend NLE's where it's easy to dump JPEGs straight into the timeline and, obviously, allow each last 1 frame in duration??

Subsequent to animating the 30 secs, I'll be shooting it off a computer monitor to give it a pixelated, degraded, on screen effect: so it doesn't matter about output formats of the NLE - once it can play full screen on the computer.

Another requirement, actually, is that the NLE is available for a free 30 day trial!

Thanks very much, in advance, for any suggestions.

Graham

Pretty much all of them from I-Movie up can import single frames. They might do it differently, but its a standard feature. In Avid for instance, you can import them with a specific 'duration'. By the way, old school animation was usually two frames a drawing.

Assuming they're a numbered sequence, in Vegas you just do a File - Open, pick the first one, and check the box to import a sequence. I'm sure any NLE should be able to handle this task for you.

As Richard has already mentioned, pretty much all of them should be able to do it. You could try Premiere Pro, Vegas all available for free 30 day trial. I know in Premiere you can set the default still duration, so once set when you import each frame into your timeline and they will all be the same (correct) length. This could then be exported as an AVI for use later...

Make sure that they are the correct frame size and aspect ratio before importing them!

Cheers,

One tip: if possible I would save those stills in another format.
JPEG is a lossy format that throws away information which is
usually especially visible in handdrawn stuff! Why not save to
something like TIFF or TARGA?

However I just read output quality isn't too important, so this
would not matter to you as well (although I would still prefer
to maintain the utmost quality if you ever want to use it in the
future etc.).

Thanks for these great tips folks.

Graham