Working with still images

While it’s perfectly fine to create a video that’s entirely composed of clips of recorded footage, it’s also possible to use a combination of still images and recorded footage in a video project. For example, a still image could be used as a background for opening titles or ending credits, or as an accompanying visual for narration or music.

In this exercise, we’ll add some still images to the Intro sequence in the Dances project — one will eventually serve as the background for the opening credits, while the others will accompany a voice-over track that introduces the video’s content.

Adding a still image to a sequence

Adding a still image to a sequence follows the same process as adding audio and video clips to a sequence — all we need to do is press and drag the image from the Project panel to the Timeline panel. Once the image is added to the timeline, we can adjust the duration, or amount of time that an image is displayed on screen for. The default duration for a still image is five seconds, but we can make this longer or shorter as needed. The first image we’ll add to the sequence will later serve as the background for the opening title.

Let’s start by adding the image title.jpg to the beginning of the Intro sequence on track V1, then adjust the duration to 10 seconds.

We now have the first image added to the sequence. Next, we’ll see how we can add multiple images to the timeline and edit them all at the same time.

Adding and editing multiple still images at the same time

In addition to the title.jpg image clip we just added to the timeline, the Intro sequence will also contain six more still images that will display on screen while a voice-over introduces viewers to the topic of the video. The images should display on screen for a little bit longer than the voice-over clip, so once we add the images to the sequence, we’ll adjust the duration of the images so they collectively display on screen for about 50 seconds.

We can add all six images to the sequence at the same time by selecting all of the images in the Project panel, then dragging them to the Timeline panel like we did with title.jpg. Afterwards, we’ll select the images in the sequence using the Track Select Tool, then use the Clip Speed/Duration dialog box to change the length of time each image displays on screen to a little over seven seconds. To make sure the images don’t all overlap each other once the duration is changed, we’ll need to select the “Ripple edit (shift trailing clips)” option in the Clip Speed/Duration dialog box as we change the duration for the selected clips.

After completing step 2, the Intro sequence should look similar to the following screenshot:

Scaling images to fit inside the frame

We now have all of the still images we want to use in the Intro sequence added to the timeline. However, not all of the images we just added are the same size, and many of them are larger than the frame size for the sequence. To ensure we can see all of each image and not just part, we’ll scale all of the images so they fit inside the frame. To change them all at the same time, we’ll need to ensure all the images are selected first.

NOTE: When previewing the sequence, many of the still images have black bars to the left and right of them in the Program Monitor — this is because the images don’t have the same proportions as the frame size for the sequence. While we won’t worry about this for today’s project, to avoid this in future projects, you’ll want to edit the images in Photoshop to make sure they’re the same dimensions as the frame size before adding them to the project.

Adding default transitions to still images

Now that we’ve added all the images and scaled them to fit inside the sequence’s frame size, let’s add the default transition to the images on the timeline so each one fades into the next. We’ll apply default transitions to the clips using a keyboard shortcut this time.