>>>>>It seems to leave, "case closed" as <<<

I think not.
Important here is that Vegas (as all NLEs) does nothing with all our settings until output is requested (preview or render). Unfortunately to most of us (certainly to me) Vegas is a black box with many twiddleable knobs, and when I ask for output it applies my settings one at a time in an "unknown" order. In particular, scaling is applied on output.
Spot has pointed out that nothing is done to stills (as with all else) until output, so your 10MB still remains just that on the timeline and you can twiddle the knobs as you like without affecting your source in anyway. So if all the arithmetic Bob set up is done before scaling, the test tells us nothing about the matter in hand and only that Vegas does its arithmetic correctly.
Spot has no doubt that he is correct and that Sony agrees (he's out in dial-up land presently, but has been kind enough to reply to my email queries). That I've carried the tablets of wisdom doesn't mean that I have a definative understanding of the issue!!

This is true Serena. That's why you need crop and correctly size and set resolution (including pixel shape) BEFORE you import to Vegas. If you import with a high resolution and then pan, Vegas will likely reduce the image resolution first and the apply the cut away and any enlargement will show poor resolution. That's why I said I always pan with the CAMERA over a quality blowup. Also you get a smooth natural sweep that way. Watch Ken Burns' still pans and they certainly look to me that they are not done in an NLE.

no doubt burns shot the stills in his early works, as we all did, if he still does i don't know but i think the effect can now be pulled of flawlessly in the edit , have no idea about the resolution issue 2k ,3k whatever technical stuff, but we scan pics at a high rez and/or create in ps , do a pan do a crop and move wherever and ,,,,, works for us, and any client that has ever seen it.

To clarify what I'd said:
Vegas scales everything eventually, to smaller than 2k. This may or may not be a problem. As MHStevens points out, it *can* be a good workflow, and often is, to resize images in an outside app, depending on what you're doing with them. My experience is that if I'm doing "standard" zooming, if there is such a term, that doesn't go for more than say...50% of the depth, then I get a better output from a 2K image than I do from an 8K image on final render to 4:2:2 YUV for print to HDCAM, or 4:2:0 for print to XDCAM HD, or even to DV, for that matter, simply because of the way Vegas scales. Photoshop and Irfanview do a better job, my opinion based on my eye experience. YMMV.
At the end of the day, Vegas doesn't touch the original media, but internal processes are limited to 2K, unless Sony tells me something has changed in Vegas 6 or 7.

Please anyone feel free to try to repo this test, it's dead simple.

In PS create a 10,000 x 576 (make that 480 if you're a NTSC bod) image, white filled. Apply the Noise FX at 100% Gaussian. This gives you an image with pixels all over the place. Now reduce the image size to 2,000 pixels wide. A big mess, right.
If what's being said is correct this is what you'd see in Vegas if Vegas scaled to 2K as this image went into its pipeline.
OK undo the Change Image Size in PS and save as BMP.

Open Vegas, drop that monster still on a SD T/L.
Use Event Pan/Crop to match Output AR. Set Preview to Best/Full.
You should see much the same mess as you saw in PS when you changed the image size to 2,000 pixel wide BUT YOU DON'T!

You see clean noise pixels, no blur, nothing nasty, you've extracted a 720x576 frame from a 10,000 x 576 still. Perfectly!

I guess I could try this at 1,000,000 x 576 but PS must blow up at some point!

So come on guys and gals, I might be completely wrong, please try this at home and see what YOU get. Sure don't look like anything 2K'ish going on to me.

Vegas's INTERNAL pipelines probably are 2K but is the image pan/crop internal? It would seem not so.

Bob (The Measurabator)

I have to believe everyone is correct - cause I'm just that kind of guy. My first NLE was Premiere and the very first thing I tried to do was zoom in on a large jpg that I knew was plenty big enough to produce an as good as original image for the resolution of the project. But what Premiere did was resample the jpg on the timeline to match the project THEN zoom in - which resulted in a disappointing first experience with NLEs. This is the same thing that happens when you zoom in using track motion instead of pan crop in Vegas (right?). It's hard to articulate in words as most of us have proven. So I say let the little squirrels behind the scenes eat as many nuts as they want because I'm getting plenty of peanut butter out the other end. (WTF did I just say?)

BTW I answered Ted offline but for the rest of you who care, that last little song loop I used was "Hey Ya!" by Outcast.

>>>Bob (The Measurabator)<<<

Easy to misread that!

Well, OK, it's 40 deg C here but just for this thread I powered up Vegas. I used a different image, in fact a resolution chart, and pre-processed a segment of the chart using Photoshop. In Vegas, zooming into the large image (to match the area shown in the smaller), and using Best/Full on the pre-view monitor, I can't see any difference. That's nice (just what I originally hoped when using stills) and I guess, in view of Spot's understanding, these things are now done differently since Vegas 5.

You shouldn't see a difference, if the enlarged area still encompasses 2k worth of media....Does that make more sense?

Yes but I was using a 10K x 10K image!

Pan/Crop that to 720x576 at best and the result is pixel perfect.
Given that the 'picture' is 100% chroma noise you'd see the impact of any prescaling to 2K immediately, it simply aint happening, Vegas is taking the full 10K x 10K image and cropping it perfectly to 720 x 576.

Just to test I tried scaling it to 2Kx2K in PS, the result is a mostly grey mess.

If you prescaled the image to 2Kx2k in PS prior to dropping it onto the Vegas T/L you'd take a very serious quality hit.

Bob.

I just tried it with a 48MB image (8Kx6K).

Vegas obviously handles very large files, there would be outcry for a long time if it didn't.

Zooming on a 48MB file and comparing a portion of that to the same portion of a smaller size file I could not tell the difference in a quick test.

The final output can't be more than 2kx2k, but it accommodates larger files for pan/crop fine.

>>>> 2k worth of media<<<

Yes, fair enough. However I did repeat with PAL DV and got the same comparison. And now in Vegas 5. Bob did his test at PAL DV project properties, so we seem to have reached similar conclusions. Is it that we're both doing inadequate tests? I haven't rendered anything out to check the final product.

I'm not sure where the concept came about that Vegas can't handle large files.
The point I made, and still make, is that Vegas scales smaller images better than it scales larger images, if I were to reduce my experience to it's simplest form. Of course Vegas can manage very large images, it *always* has. The question is how well it scales compared to other tools, and that's always been my point, and still is my point. Vegas does a much better job now than it used to do, but it still isn't as optimal as some other tools, which is why I recommend scaling large images as batch files in other apps.
YMMV.

I'd be pretty amazed if Vegas produced something different in it's rendered output to what it show on the preview at Best/Full!

I avoided doing this though as the effects of DV sampling and compression would have a pretty major impact and that really wasn't what the test was about.

>>>I'm not sure where the concept came about that Vegas can't handle large files.<<<

That was my misunderstanding. Just go to the top of this thread!!

I don't read anyone saying that Vegas cannot handle large files, what's being said is that Vegas handles them correctly.

The conclusion that some are drawing from your off forum statement is simply wrong and there's more than my trivial experiments to back that up.

Two examples of how your statement is being twisted. The statement is that the maximum resolution that Vegas can process is 2K x 2K.

Now what does that mean, well remember the old chestnut of how to make text tickertape in Vegas? Standard trick is to create a very, very long image in say PS and use Event Pan/Crop to scroll that across the bottom of the screen. If Vegas was prescaling that to 2K x whatever it'd get pretty ugly real quick. The technique works, Vegas works from the 50Kx20 image just fine.

Secondly, create a photowall of say 1,000 images, probably 100K x 100K, pan and zoom around into that and yes, you can get each one of those photos full screen at full res. If the entire frame was being prescaled to 2K x 2k it'd also fall apart but it doesn't.

Vegas will take an image as big as you can create and does NOT prescale it to 2Kx2K prior to Event Pan / Crop.


Now suddenly we're talking about how WELL Vegas downscales. Well that's a completely different issue altogether! Perhaps other apps do a better job, it's a much harder and subjective matter to test.
BUT this has nothing to do with where things headed, if you want to do serious zooming into a huge image downscaling it before it goes into Vegas is totally counter productive.

Bob.