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How to make a single frame movie from an audio file

Specific to Premiere Elements version 2020

How to make a single frame movie from an audio file

Postby munk Miikael » Sat Mar 06, 2021 2:16 pm

Can one get the Premiere Elements Video Editor to export at 1 frame per second and if so, how to adjust it? The reason I ask is because sometimes I would like to link an audio file with a single picture and then I would like the output file to be as small as possible. There is no point to have 30fps when there is really only one single frame throughout the final .mp4 file. All I want is to attach a picture to an audio file, not to get a huge 1000MB file with only one picture and then work it through HandBrake to make it small again - if even that works. Thanks!
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Re: How to make a single frame movie from an audio file

Postby Steve Grisetti » Sat Mar 06, 2021 10:55 pm

Well, you can certainly output an audio only file.

And you can use a still frame as your entire video.

But I'm not sure there will be much value in doing this. It's still a video file, even if that video is a single still frame. So a 5 minute video and a 5 minute video of a still frame with audio behind it are going to be more or less the same size.
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Re: How to make a single frame movie from an audio file

Postby Chris B » Sun Mar 07, 2021 5:25 am

Steve's right in that a file with a certain bit rate is going to be the same size no matter what the file content. However obviously a lower bitrate is going to produce a smaller file. You could lower the bitrate of the export - but that would be a trial and error process and I don't think PE really suited to doing that.

Your comment about handbrake does however make sense and I had a quick experiment. Using output from Vegas of a single image and one of the standard exports Vegas produced a file with 2200 kbit data rate - giving about 30MB for 2 minutes of video. Encoding with handbrake and telling it to use a "quality" based coder which adjusts bitrate to maintain a certain quality of image and selecting the optimisation for still images handbrake produced an 87kbit stream which was only 1.3 MB for the same two minutes. The output was basically indistinguishable. I'm sure you could play with the settings to reduce that further if required possibly with some minor loss of image quality.

As a further comment I told handbrake to reduce the framerate but this produced a larger file so you might be better sticking with a "normal" framerate.
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Re: How to make a single frame movie from an audio file

Postby munk Miikael » Wed Mar 17, 2021 5:52 pm

Thank you very much! I am not sure if I understood correctly what using "a still frame as your entire video." I was using previously VideoPad editor. There I could select 1fps for 50 minutes of audio and 1 picture, giving me in the end a 50MB file. With Premiere Elements the smallest size I could get with the same settings was 700MB. But VideoPad soons starts demanding payment and it seems questionable whether it is worth the while to buy the program for only one function. I guess I better put the two videos here, so you can see.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Anyway I read out from your answer that it can't be done with PE?
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Re: How to make a single frame movie from an audio file

Postby Chris B » Wed Mar 17, 2021 6:48 pm

I had a quick look at the two files. The videopad file is indeed 1fps - but more importantly it's video data rate is an incredibly low 23kbs. Making handbrake do that to the PE file means the image become blocky. It seems that videopad does something clever with the video because it knows it's a single image and produces a good quality image that doesn't then change. I'm not an expert on the current versions of PE so I don't know if this is something that's possible on the export configuration.

Given videopad does a better job with the file and does what you want it might be worth the purchase.
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Re: How to make a single frame movie from an audio file

Postby munk Miikael » Thu Mar 18, 2021 2:38 pm

Thank you very much for the advice! I will consider buying then. VideoPad was quite nice, but the main reason I moved over to PE was because VideoPad really started lagging and became slow when editing larger projects, also it did not offer all the zooming possibilities, at least not in the free version.
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