hi resolution pictures (photos) in vegas

nataq wrote on 8/17/2006, 2:26 AM
Hi all,
I just did a lot of reading on how to optimize the results of panning/cropping and zooming of high resolution still images in vegas.

Since I use a camera with 16mPixel for my images it didn´t seem satisfying for me to resize the pictures to fit vegas. Especially if I wanted to zoom in quite a bit without loosing quality and having a stair effect.

I tried a lot until I fould the best sollution for me. Excuse me if this idea isn´t new, but the search tool didn´t show any results.

Actually it is quite simple.
In the properties of your project just change "HDV 1080-50i" or "HD 1080-50i"
Then render the project to mpeg2 or avi with template "HDV 1080-50i" or "HD 1080-50i", changing video rendering quality to "best".

With the resulting file(s) you can work as if the still images were a video. And the quality is quite fine.

The only con as far as I can see is rendering time, but then again it is not you who is working but the computer.

I hope this helps at least a bit.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 8/17/2006, 5:33 AM
Another big con is that you are compressing the pictures to MPEG2 which is going to be a substantial quality hit. You may not notice it in the preview window, but after another render and viewing the output full size i'm sure it will be noticeable. Also, your resulting images are now only 1440x1080 which means you won't be able to zoom in much at all, about 2.25x if you are working in SD.

What is your objection to resizing the images? There are tools that automate the process and will do so much much faster than creating an HD file. Are you afraid of losing the original files? Make copies first, or have the resizing software save new copies instead of overwriting the originals.
farss wrote on 8/17/2006, 6:56 AM
Well actually as they're stills the quality hit will not be too bad, I've done stills to mpeg-2 at frightenlingly low average bitrate (high max to handle transitions) and they held up as well as anything.

However this does seem a rather oddball way to work, I've always just never bothered to resize stills, even ones at huge resolution.

The aliasing is a problem, adding vertical GB at the lowest possible value will help but kills the res more than I like. I get around this by setting project properties to 1920x1080 (NOT HDV @ 1440x1080) and render to SD 16:9 mpeg-2. Even then at times I've run two tracks, one with the GB and one without and use C Cutter(s) or Beziers to mask out just the offending parts of the frame.

Yes, this can be a lot of tedious work but the results are worth it.

Bob.
nataq wrote on 8/17/2006, 7:39 AM
Maybe I just didn´t state well enough what I was after.

I am zooming into high resolution pictures and am using HD video. I do a lot of batch automation in photoshop, so I don´t mind it at all, it is just not flexible enough to work with these resized pictures. When I resize the pictures to 1920x1080, there isn´t much left to zoom in.
If you don´t like to render to mpg2, you can render to avi.

After I have rendered the sequence, there is nothing more to zoom in any more, because the sequence is ready and I render it to DV widescreen mpg2. Give it a try, it works quite fine for me. At least better than the other methods I have tried.