Filmstrip (.FLM) export / import function in After Effects (and Premiere and Photoshop)

I really miss the Filmstrip option too! I found many creative ways to use it back in the day and would love to do some more experimenting with it now. It´s really annoying that it´s made impossible to activate old enough versions of Photoshop and Premiere to be able to use this cool feature. Please bring the Filmstrip back!

I use filmstrip all the time, and was going to use it again at work but couldn't find it in the newer AE or Premiere export options, then stumbled across this thread.  I guess my home copies are pretty old.  As a traditional rotoscoper it was highly beneficial.  Sad to see it's gone.

Hi Mylenium and Roland,

Thanks for taking the time to get back to me.

This is just a test - but I took some screenshots of an experiment I did which I hope will help explain what I mean.

Here is a section of the Filmstrip as it looked when exported from After Effects CS3 originally - it shows the individual frames of a piece of 1920x1080 video.

The test subject I used is an object rotating, suspended on a piece of thread against a grey background.

For reference, for 5 seconds of 25fps video, the Filmstrip's Image Size in Photoshop CS3 is 9640 x 28496 pixels at 72dpi which is quite large.

Below is a section of the Filmstrip after I did a test edit in Photoshop CS3, applying some layers to create texture. I took some photos of plant leaves and a piece of wood with scratches and copy pasted / scaled them up to fill the entire 9640 x 28496 pixel Filmstrip image. Then I applied blending effects and transparency to integrate the textures within the frames of the Filmstrip.

Photoshop appeared to handle the file very well on my MacBook Pro 2014 (16GB RAM / Nvidia GPU). It didn't slow down too much even when there are three or four layers present and dealing with such a big Filmstrip file containing lots of 1920x1080 frames.

Then I flattened the image in Photoshop and saved the Filmstrip.

Then I reimported the edited Filmstrip into the After Effects CS3 timeline and added it to the Render Queue as a test export, creating a 1920 x 1080 pixel video based on the edited, textured Filmstrip.

The result of this experiment is a video with various distressed textures over the frames of the original subject.

The Filmstrip format allowed me to work quite quickly, applying texture to all frames at one time (effectively as a single Photoshop image composed of loads of small compartments) because all the frames are presented together as a grid in the Filmstrip file.

I like this process as there's a degree of uncertainty involved in what you're going to get as a result - it depends what images you use and which blending effects you apply in Photoshop.

I could have imported the original video into Photoshop's Timeline and edited each frame individually, treating each frame as a single image to copy paste texture on top of, or to draw / paint on top of etc etc. But I think this way of working would have taken much longer.

ie because I'd have had to create texture on each individual frame, one after the other rather than just copy pasting various large format textures over all the individual frames at once as I can within the Filmstrip format file.

I mentioned Garbage's Stupid Girl video in my original post

Garbage - Stupid Girl - YouTube

As I undersand, the effect here was achieved by taking the original film for the video and distressing its appearance by placing the whole roll of film in a bath of acid / scratching it etc etc Garbage - Stupid Girl documentary 2014 - YouTube  (Process is discussed at 20mins 50seconds). ie so all frames are being affected at one time.

If the director had acid distressed each frame individually this would have taken much longer, and likely the distressing effect would not flow so naturally throughout the duration of the video.

I hope the above explanation and images make a bit clearer what I've been trying to do.

Any thoughts welcome and thanks again.

Kind regards,

John

You're probably the only one in a million users, honestly. So no, it's won't be coming back. The rest is too vague to make much sense of it. Since you haven't actually shown the kind of artwork you produce with the process it's impossible to a) understand your reasons for using this workflow and b) advising on alternatives.

Mylenium