Photo Resolution

what-a-day! wrote on 5/6/2007, 6:21 PM

Hi, I read on an other forum thread that photos of 655x480 resolution shoudl be good enough for quality output and avoiding size problems of finished product. I am using photos of 968x648 resolution, however the resulting mpg file plays 'grainey' on edges. What might be the reason for that? Thanks!

Comments

bjrohner wrote on 5/9/2007, 8:20 AM

The size of the photo's you use really has nothing to do with the size of the finished product if you're creating DVD's. But the size before processing has alot to do with the quality of the finished product.

Are you scanning in old photo's. If so here's what I do. It's alot of work scanning in photo's so I only want to do it once. I assume that someday I may want to redo my project in high definition say at 720p. I also assume that,on many pictures I may want to zoom in at four to one for a closeup of someones smiling face. We want the computer to throw away information, not make up it's own when re-rezzing to create a movie so you need a vertical resolution of 4 times 720 or 2880 at a minimum to meet the criteria. Regarding the horizontal resolution, I just let it float because of all the photo size variations. The computer will create side bars as necessary at any rate. A picture at TV size of 4:3 will be 3840 x 2880. I know these will be large files but you can archive several hundred of them on a data DVD. Keep this raw data and put your pictures away in a safe place.

Save your files as TIFF or BMP. I believe TIFF saves just a hair more color information. I don't use PNG for archiving because when you recall them in photoshop for editing PNG processes very slowly. Never, ever use JPEG if you can possibly advoid it. You'll end up with artifacts all over hell and generally it shows up in areas that are hardest to clean up like peoples faces.

When your ready, call up these files from your DVD, finish crop, enhance, and clean them in photoshop. A product called Neat Image does a fantastic job of removing grain and other noise in the photos. It has the ability to batch process by the way. When you have all your photos looking good, use the batch processor in photoshop to convert all these files to PNG for placement in your VMS movie. VMS
loves the PNG format. It will process TIFF files but it is unbelievably slow.

I'm not sure why people worry about these photo files being too large. I can place around five or six hundred of these large files in a movie. Run through and apply a little motion and zoom to each to keep the show interesting and render a movie in about five hours.

Bob