Best still format save??

DGrob wrote on 5/10/2003, 10:23 AM

Howdy. Have got family stills on CD in a proprietary format. Open them in Adobe Elements and modify for image quality (no filters etc added at that stage), then save to folders on E drive for slide show assembly. They're showing up as jpegs in Elements by default. I think I can get the CD mini-software to save as . . . say a .tif or .png. Given the tiffs are 2x the size of pngs, any input on good quality format to work this process through until I finally render my .avi???

Good quality to enable zoom, pan, pip animations are my objective.

TIA, Grob

Comments

kameronj wrote on 5/10/2003, 11:05 AM

depending on what the files look like prior to saving/converting to TIF or PNG....I would say TIF (if you have the space)...but PNG don't look so bad either. Heck, I pulled in JPEGs that I took with my digital camera and they look great in VV.

That's my $0.02

jetdv wrote on 5/10/2003, 8:49 PM

Use .PNG. Vegas uses them much better and faster. TIF requires decoding by Quicktime.

vicmilt wrote on 5/10/2003, 11:18 PM

and make sure that you are saving at 72dpi. You don't need or want finer resolution. 72dpi is all that screen resolution requires.

mikkie wrote on 5/11/2003, 9:50 AM

There are IMO only two prob with jpg files - you don't want to save an image as a jpg if you still plan on editing it, and the quality of a jpg can very widely depending on what software does the conversion. Both are because the jpg format throws out some of your picture data. On the other hand, once a picture is converted to jpg, you're not going to get that lost data back, so if you're pictures are already jpg, not much to gain by changing them to something else, at least re: quality.

Png files are supposed to be a lossless alternative to jpg, giving you smaller image size and quality.

If I understand your orig. post correctly Grob, you've got photos on something like a Kodak photo CD, and want to both edit & change the format so you can import the results into Vegas. Ideally I'd suggest opening the files directly off the CD if possible in Elements, then saving as png since Adobe does pretty good with this format. If you have to save the files first using whatever software on the CD, you might be better off using tif, then saving in Elements to png, deleting the tifs after edit.

A tif file usually saves everything in the image, so you don't have to worry about the quality of the conversion if the mini-CD software is less then stellar.

FWIW, haven't heard of too many file formats that couldn't be opened by Adobe software, and haven't heard of any where there wasn't software available that can do batch conversion, if that saves you any time.

VIDEOGRAM wrote on 5/11/2003, 10:21 AM

Hi,

JPG is a lossy compression. I wouldn't recommend archiving in this format.
.tga, .tif, .psd are not lossy. Therefore, each edit of the file will not degrade the original picture. Also, .tga and .psd will permit to sage 32 bits instead of 24, carrying the alpha channel if desired.

Gilles

DGrob wrote on 5/11/2003, 11:15 AM

Got it. Gonna bring them into My Docs off the CD as *.png. Open in Elements and enhance, then save to project folder as *.png. When I save out of Elements, I get an option, "interlace or none." Is this relevent to my NTSC render??

Hey, thanks to you all. What a great forum.

Grob

riredale wrote on 5/12/2003, 12:53 PM

I guess I'm not sure if you're asking about an archiving format, or a temporary format to get your images into Vegas. If the latter, I would suggest that pretty much anything will work, since video is such a low-resolution medium. I typically use jpegs of about 250KB in size measuring about 900x1200 pixels. Images with that resolution are good for nearly all zooming I need to do.

Some evening when you have some time, create a couple of versions of one of your stills, and bring them onto the Vegas timeline. You'll be able to see for yourself just how much source quality is needed before your resulting video starts to show artifacts.