Another question about still photos and quality

fbx wrote on 12/18/2002, 7:49 PM
Is there an optimum input size/resolution for photos? Will 5 megapixel pix right out of my sony 707 still camera look better than the same photos resized to 720x480?

Also, I get a slim black bar on the left and right of every photo brought into VF. Is this simply the proportional diff between the video frame and the digital still frame, or is this something else?

Thanks in advance--

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/18/2002, 8:44 PM
There are tons of posts about this topic in these forums already. Search for something like photo resolution or still image resolution, and you'll find more than you ever wanted to know.

Basic quick answers: 1) No, generally larger images won't look noticeably better because rendering them will resize them to 720x480 anyway. In fact, it's often better to resize them first so that you have control over the sharpness of the resizing. 2) The proper size for importing digital photos into an NTSC DV project is 654.5 x 480 (or 655 is close enough). Any size with an equivalent ratio will fill the frame completely both side to side and top to bottom.
fbx wrote on 12/18/2002, 11:39 PM
Thanks for the reply, but after posting i did a quick test using original JPG files (2560x1920x24) and smaller resized versions (720x540x24), and in all cases the MPG2 files made by VF showed the larger pictures to be clearly sharper.

Will do some further testing.

Thanks for the exact 655x480 dimensions--I wonder why this DOES NOT show up in the Video Event Properties Pan & Crop of VF? Seems as though it should.
Hammer wrote on 12/20/2002, 10:08 AM
I would assume it would have to do with the software that did the resizing LS. If the software you used to resize prior to importing used a method that was worse than VF's it would look better. I would think a dedicated editing program like Photoshop would give better results though. Also you may want to choose a file format that is lossless if you are really concerned about still quality. JPG can do some nasty things to your shots depending on the compression settings you choose. This is just an assumption on my part but you're probably getting a jpg from your digicam, then resizing, then saving to jpg again and importing. Thus, putting your image through two jpg compressions. Where as, if you are importing the large jpg directly, it is only going through a single compression.
fbx wrote on 12/21/2002, 3:41 AM
no, actually i'm half a step ahead. took my original JPG, converted to lossless tiff. DOwnsized to smaller TIFF, converted to lossless PNG.