max resolution of stills for Vegas timeline

Avene wrote on 12/7/2006, 4:33 PM

Woah, I didn't know that. I hope that isn't the case.

fldave wrote on 12/7/2006, 4:33 PM

That's good to know, if true. And it should be easy to test with a large image with calibration in it.

Edited: I looked in the manual and there was no mention of limitations. I know many people on this forum routinely use higher res pics than 2kx1k

Serena wrote on 12/7/2006, 4:59 PM

Yes, me too. I've generally ignored advice to pre-process stills to compatible resolution because I use them only occasionally. But when I do use them it is usually with animation and I've been happily doing so with the understanding that Vegas would be extracting a full res frame from whatever I presented to it. So I did seek clarification from Spot but still could have got it wrong (wouldn't be the first time!).

Tech Diver wrote on 12/7/2006, 5:30 PM

Well I don't know where that 1000x2000 limit comes from. I routinely use images from the Hubble telescope that are 4000x8000 in PNG format. I need that high a resolution because I create scenes where I zoom from a great distance into the heart of galaxies and nebulas, or I might pan from one nebula to another in the same galaxy over "vast distances". One time I used an image of Mars that was 10k by 10k with incredible details of volcanos and canyons that I would zoom in and out of, to tour the martian landscape.

ushere wrote on 12/7/2006, 5:50 PM

hi serena, we meet again ;-)

it would be truly satisfying, not to mention anxiety relieving to get a definitive answer on this size issue. i'm not quite as adventurous as techd, but i sometimes wonder about my render times relative to using huge png's.

spot / sony / anyone?

either way, i can't fault what i've (or rather sony) has done till now (oh, maybe my clients can ;-])

leslie

farss wrote on 12/7/2006, 6:04 PM

Surely this is easy enough to test?

Plenty of resolution charts out there as PDFs, drop it into PS and render as a jpeg at 4Kx4k and then at 2Kx1K. Zoomed in if what's said is true they should look the same, if not you'll see the difference.

I'd do this myself but I'm not near my Vegas systems until later today.

Bob.

rs170a wrote on 12/7/2006, 6:14 PM

I did one job where the primary image (company org chart) was approx. 5K x 4K pixels. The original was a WPG (I think) so I converted it to a jpeg to save on file size.
Why so large? I needed to start with the overall view, zoom in to a department head and pan down the list of people reporting to them.
It did bog the system down (P4 3.4 HT) somewhat but it worked and everyone was impressed.

Mike

ushere wrote on 12/7/2006, 6:38 PM

bob / mike,

i notice you both write about converting to jpg. i was under the impression vegas was happiest with png's.

any reason for jpg over png?

leslie

fldave wrote on 12/7/2006, 6:45 PM

I thought jpg was more compressed, whereas png was more lossless compression.

I always use png, never jpg

Jim H wrote on 12/7/2006, 7:04 PM

I've used some VERY big jps. The end morph sequence in my end of season cross country video used a mosaic that was 12,000 x 8,000. I had to reduce the size from an even bigger version because my machine croaked (AMD 4800+ x2, 2 gig ram). But I was advised by Spot that the limit is the computer, not Vegas. Here's a low rez YouTube of that end sequence:

Am I missing the point of your original question and reference to this 2K x1K max?

rs170a wrote on 12/7/2006, 7:13 PM

As I recall, I converted to jpeg instead of png (still my preferred format) because a png from the original file format was way too large in size. The jpeg, while still a good size, was much more manageable.

Mike

Chienworks wrote on 12/7/2006, 7:46 PM

Actually the numbers are 2048x2048, and that's the maximum output resolution. I'm sure there is a maximum input resolution too, but it is way above 2048. I've used stills as large as 32Kx32K and Vegas processes them at that resolution. It crawled like a frozen snail in molasses, but it worked.

Serena wrote on 12/7/2006, 10:11 PM

Emailed Spot for clarification of what I thought I remembered. His reply:

No matter what the resolution placed on the timeline, Vegas can't manage anything larger than 2k in any direction, so it scales it accordingly, and does so to the project settings. So, interpret that how you will, but putting an 8K image on the timeline doesn't give you a better picture than putting a 2K image on the timeline, and the resultant scaling can cause scaling degradation to the larger picture, so as a general rule, it's a good idea to scale images outside of Vegas when they're really large in the first place.
Make sense?

farss wrote on 12/7/2006, 10:41 PM

Vegas I know has an internal 2K res limit.
However what does it do when scaling?
Say the original is 8Kx8K but you're maginfying 8x.
Question is does Vegas scale the 8K to 2K and then magnify that OR
does it scale the 8K to 1K directly?

OK, I'll be back at my Vegas machines soon, a simple test should resolve this. Or is it simple?
I read PS has a max limit of 4K x 4K??

If so how is anyone making such monster stills?

Bob.

farss wrote on 12/7/2006, 11:03 PM

In PS Created a 1920x1080 Noise pattern, PAR 1.0 bmp.
Created a 7680x4320 white page in PS and added a copy of the same noise pattern into the centre.

Put both onto the V6.0 T/L. Used track Pan/Crop to zoom the 7680x4320 bmp to 1920x1080. Changed upper track to 50% Add composite and added Invert FX to the event.

Result, clear screen, the two tracks are identical, Vegas is handling the 7680x4320 image correctly.

Bob.

/edit/
Should have mentioned this was done in a 1920x1080 HD project to avoid any compression artifacts getting in the way.

Serena wrote on 12/7/2006, 11:08 PM

I read Spot's reply to say that Vegas cannot handle resolutions greater than 2K x 2K (so that's the best we can achieve), but further it scales the image to project properties (ie you get 2K only if that matches your project properties). Anything we do in pan/crop follows from that. This would seem to tell us that if maintaining full project resolution is desired (when is it not?) you must process the stills prior to importing to Vegas.

Bob, I'll be interested in your experimental determinations. Which I see you've posted while I was typing this!

Jim H wrote on 12/8/2006, 1:18 AM

I'm still confused. Take my Mosaic example posted above. I wanted to be able to start zoomed in to one of the smaller images with as much quality as possible. So for best results I wanted those smaller images to match the resolution of my project. So the resultant jpg would be (project resolution) x (number of images in the jpg vertically and horizontally respectively).
I don't get why I care if the output is limited to 2kx2k so long as my project resolution is smaller than that because the alternative would be to target the total jpg size to 2kx2k and that would look like crap when I zoomed in on it. So what am I missing?

farss wrote on 12/8/2006, 1:31 AM

Nothing,
see my test results above.
I think 2 and 2 have been added to get 3 somewhere.

The theory was that if Vegas was given an image greater than 2K x 2K it ALWAYS scaled that to 2Kx2K prior to event pan/crop. In other words there was no point starting with a resolution greater than 2Kx2K.

What my tests (I hope) show is that this is not the case. I did these in a bit of a hurry but here's what I think I showed.

An image at 1920x1080 is placed inside a frame 4 times that size.
If you use event pan/crop to zoom into that original 1920x1080 frame within the larger frame and Vegas was prescaling it to 2Kx2K then you could not extract the exact same pixels, they undergo interpolation.

Except from my tests it would seem that you can in fact extract the original pixels, perfectly, no interpolation took place.

So if you stitched 100 stills together in PS to produce some monster res image even if they resulted in a 20Kx10K image you could still use event pan/crop to zoom in on one of them with no loss of resolution compared to the original still.

Hope this makes sense.

Bob.

TeetimeNC wrote on 12/8/2006, 6:26 AM

Jim H,

Team Morph looks great. What morphing tool did you use?

Jerry

MH_Stevens wrote on 12/8/2006, 6:36 AM

Serena:

Hi, here's a copy of what I posted in the HD work-flow post.

"Subject: RE: hd suggested work flow
Reply by: MH_Stevens
Date: 12/7/2006 5:46:34 PM

You should format you still to have the same resolution as your project; that way Vegas will not need to re-scale it.

When I want to pan over a still I do it with the camera over a fairly large blow up. I get better results that way and no need for any conversions in Vegas."

Michael

Chanimal wrote on 12/8/2006, 7:26 AM

Jim,

I also want to know which morph tool you used.

In addition, what is the name and artist for that song at the very end?

I still have a copy on my machine of the "Morals" musical piece you produced.

rs170a wrote on 12/8/2006, 7:52 AM

Tee Time & Chanimal, according to this thread, Jim used a combination of Andrea's Mosaic, WinMorph & Bluff Titler for the video. No mention of the music though.

Mike

cheroxy wrote on 12/8/2006, 8:47 AM

Bob,
Excellent test. It seems to leave, "case closed" as the only reply. I'm not sure why others are still confused.

DavidSinger wrote on 12/8/2006, 1:18 PM

"I'm not sure why others are still confused"

Probably because they are thinking spatially, not virtually.

I believe SPOT is correct, that at any one time only 2k X 2k is "managed" on the timeline. Thus trying to place a 4k X 4k image "on the timeline" would result in the entire image being down-rezed for that part of the timeline.

Keeping in mind that Vegas does NOT change the underlying data: when a zoom is done, Vegas most likely *re-reads the original source file* and determines the *new* upper-left X/Y zero point and fills in a re-rezed image to the "managed" screen size/format (to a max of 2k X 2k data bits).

Thus *apparent* resolution can be increased all the way to the original pixel size (as Bob discovered) *provided* that the original data was made available in the source file.

This is the same behaviour as found when only a part of a video clip is "managed" on the timeline, or when a pan-crop is used. The source is not cut apart. Just the salient bits required to obtain the result are located and displayed.

Actually, this is pretty darned clever programming!

To conclude, then, if you do not expect to pan/crop/zoom, configure your still to the format of your final output.

Otherwise, configure your still to the resolution of your most-detailed final "closeup" shot. For instance, if you are going to zoom in 8X, and want full pixel resolution at 8X zoom, then make sure the file you load into Vegas is 8X larger than the required sized of the final zoom.