Thank you musicvid. I know I can use that, but it takes my smaller resolution photo, designed to be small and then fills my screen. In Pan/Crop I basically zoom out to make the photo a smaller size on the screen, but the resolution is still not as good as if I brought it in that size to begin with. Does that make sense?

Bring in fuller resolution photos. Don't try to pre-size them.
Event pan/crop will resize / resample them nicely as long as you aren't increasing them in size.
And don't judge the product by the preview. Render them out to see how they will finally look.

> ...it takes my smaller resolution photo, designed to be small and then fills my screen.

There are two ways to adjust for this. One uses Pan/Crop and the other uses Track Motion.

Pan/Crop Method:
(1) Place the photo on a track. let's say the actual size of the photo is 240x180.

(2) Open the Pan/Crop tool and note that Width and Height (under Position) are 240x180.

(3) Adjust the width to match the width of your project and the photo will be displayed in it's original resolution.

Step 3 is a trickier than it sounds. If your project is NTSC 720x480 which is PAR 0.9091 you need to calculate the width of you project as square pixels (PAR 1.0000). 720 * 0.9091 = 654.552. You would enter 654.5 as the width in this example. If you were using square pixels like 1280x120 or 1920x1080 HD you can just use the picture dimensions.

Track Motion Method:
This is the opposite of Pan/Crop

(1) Place the photo on a track. let's say the actual size of the photo is 240x180.

(2) Open the Track Motion tool and note that Width and Height (under Position) are your project dimensions! (opposite of Pan/Crop)

(3) Adjust the width to match the width of your picture and the photo will be displayed in it's original resolution.

Note that Track Motion will display a different size picture than Pan/Crop because in Pan/Crop we compensated for the non-square pixels and Track Motion does not do this. Of course you could convert the picture width to non-square pixels to use in Track Motion.

Both of these will give you the actual resolution of the picture set within the project dimensions.

~jr

Johnny,
How would you do it? Looks like the OP is after a photo montage.
Would you start with full resolution photos and size them in Vegas?
Or would you pre-size the photos to lower dimensions first as the OP has?

If we were back in the early days of NLE, I would have sized the photos first and kept them that way because the resampling algorithms were generally lousy.

A few years back I ran some tests and resizing in Vegas held up as well as in Photoshop. So I've thought it is faster to do the work in Vegas.

Your thoughts?

If you want to automate the process, you can use the Logo Resize tool in Excalibur which will reset an image back to it's original size. The Pan/Crop or Track Motion can be adjusted to position the image.

One thing to keep in mind as far as *why* this happens is that Vegas resamples everything to match your project properties. It does this automatically and when it comes to stills pretty mindlessly. Every bit of video will be resampled to fit in the frame. It's handy sometimes but annoying when you're working with stills this way.

Rob Mack