Legomation Saga

On Sunday, Chris and his friend Mitch decided to make a Legomation movie.  I provided some tech support but it took far too much effort. 

Chris and Mitch did all the scripting, planning and taking of the still photos.  I then set to work to work out how to read the still images into the computer and form them into a video.  Menwhile Mitch and Chris used Audacity (A free audio program) to record the soud and trim it down.  I was still messing around with the video when the sound files arrived as WAV files.  They had numbered and named them so I knew in which order they were to be placed.

OK so the plan had been to read the stills into windows movie maker and have windows moviemaker render a DV format file that would be read into Adobe premiere 6. The audio would then be grafted in.  This plan had been chosen because this had worked in the past. This plan came unstuck when Movie Maker would not save in DV format.  Whenever I chose that option it would just hang. 

Now I really like Premiere 6 however it has a few issues and is a bit old.  For some reason it hangs when reading in the still images and it also can not create DVDs.

There was an additional hassle that Premeiere Elements 4 requires one to go online to activate the DVD section.  So at midnight when I go to make the DVD, I find its not acticated on the computer I was using.  And b%^$#dy Adobe's activation site was down for maintenance.  So I had to move the not insignificant file via an external hard disk to a computer that is barely working in order to render the DVD.

I also own Premeiere Elements 4.  I hate the user interface.  However it does create good DVDs and as it turns out it was able to read in the still images.  So the procedure we used in the end was
1.  Read still images into Premiere Elements 4  (Start by setting the default still image duration to 5 frames)
2.  Save the movie in DV format
3.  Open Premiere 6.  Read in the file.  Place on time line.
4.  Read in all the audio files.
5.  Place the first audio segment on the timeline starting at the right position.
6.  Find the last piece of video associated with this audio.  Cut using Razor tool.  Drag video on the timeine until the start lines up with the end of the audio.
7.  Look back through the video and choose a chunk to replicate to fill the gap.  Slice with the razor tool.
8.  Fill the gap in the video by copying and pasting chunks of video.
9.  Repeat for each audio segment.
10. Save as DV format.
11.  Read into Premiere Elements 4
12.  Create DVD.
13.  I also saved it with Cinepack and some other codec onto a USB memory stick for PC replay.