Pictures of what? Taken from what? What are you using to scan the images? When you say "scanning pictures in," what exactly are talking about?

Scanning an image (from a photo, book, magazine, brochure, etc.) shouldn't be a problem. I always save them as a .png file (lossless). Had no trouble at all imprting them into Vegas.

PNG or TGA is the best way to bring pix in. Another user from Canada pointed out that some PNG's have color shift, and they certainly do, I tested it after it was brought up.
Vegas can handle anything up to 4k x4K. You'll do best with resolutions of 150 dpi unless you are deeply zooming on the timeline. Then you may want more resolution at the risk of noise. That can always be dealt with too.
The CVS/Walmart route isn't bad, actually. We did this on a quick project once, it worked out quite well. No scanning to deal with, just load the disc and we were good.

Or you could always use the old school method with a light table and a camera mounted direclty above it, put the picture under the camera, and capture the picture directly into Vegas. We still do that all the time for our consumer division since people don't want to pay for us to sit there and scan all their pictures in.

It sounds like there is something strange with your scanning technique. I have a cheap little Canon FB620U USB scanner ($100 three years ago) and it takes maybe 1 minute to do a high-res scan. If you computer is telling you that it's "out of memory" then you've got problems somewhere--a typical Jpeg photograph is maybe 150KB in size.

As for quality, I've concluded that video is such a horrible format where resolution is concerned that you can bring in a pretty coarse photograph and still not notice much of a difference. The only time you need a megapixel or two is when you are zooming in on a portion, as already noted.

I use Jpeg, but you can use anything you want.

"takes maybe 1 minute to do a high-res scan"

Must be a real pain when a client brings in 1000 pictures they want put into a video. When that happens having a light table can be priceless :)

I just recently made a movie from stills.

I scanned them in JPEG format from an HP5500c scanner and could not be more pleased. The scanner is about $250, but it has a feeder for photos and a back-light for negatives and slides.

The negatives I used were everything from 35mm to crazy non-standard large format negatives and it worked great. Some of my photos were up to 34Meg in size and had no memory problems with pan/zoom and Red effects (Red effects can slow down the preview pane somewhat).

I posted a web location of the movie a few days ago. It is my 3rd movie and the 2nd with Vegas (first was with Movie Maker) so it does not compare with the great stuff done by the experts here.

david

If it is going to be for TV use only, I use my TRV900 which takes 640X480 digital pictures. Since TV only has 640X480 res. that is all you need unless you do deep zooming on the picture on the timeline. If you are going to use it in a pc environment, then you may want to use a higher res of picture. I dont even scan, as it is so slow and I have the option of taking a digital picture.

my 2 cents...
dave

My rule of thumb (having 3 whole 4 minute movies as a reference) is to at least double the 640 x 480 (unless doing DV which is slightly higher) and if it is a particular interesting shot, then maybe much more.

I figure it is always easy to rescale in Photoshop.

Memory is cheap and sometimes a clip is made or lost based on a very fine detail.

david

Have a look at the Mihov Image Resizer.

I use it all the time to convert my standard 1.2 MB jpeg files to 70K for internet postiong. You can scale most images up or down by any scale factor.

It's free and you can find it at http://www.imageresizer.com/

Here is Mihov's description:

Mihov Image Resizer is a handy tool for batch resizing images in bmp, gif, and jpg picture formats. You can make pictures or any kind of images smaller or bigger - whichever you need at the time.

The second feature of the program is converting pictures between different graphic formats. You can change from bitmap to JPEG or GIF, from JPEG to GIF or from GIF to JPEG. Again, this can be made in batch mode. That means that you will only have to select the images and the program will do the rest for all selected images.

The third major feature is rotating. If you have a digital camera and you took some upright shots you will have to turn them arround. What better way than with Mihov Image Resizer? You can rotate the photos to the left or to the right. This feature comes handy also when you are scanning and are too lazy to turn the pictures...

Mihov Image Resizer is also a perfect utility for creating thumbnails, so you can put them on your home page for faster loading or send pictures with smaller size to family and friends by e-mail.

Currently, these languages are supported: English (default), Slovenian, German, Afrikaans, Chinese, Dansk, Dutch, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak, and Spannish, Swedish, and Turkish. And you can add your own language here.

Mihov Image Resizer works in batch mode, which means more time for you!