Photo's with Video

John222 wrote on 4/14/2015, 3:16 PM

I'm sure this is a super newbe question from a guy that should know better but here goes... I'm doing some talent audition videos where I have to add photo's along with video. Basically photo stills of my performer over video of the performance. These will be shown on Youtube or Vimeo at 720p. Should I use pan and crop to resize these photo's or should they be resized with photoshop prior to putting on the vegas timeline. If photoshop is the preferred method, to what resoulution should they be resized?

Comments

xberk wrote on 4/14/2015, 3:20 PM

Generally I resize photos in Vegas (pan/crop) .. It's easier and faster. Of course, if that presents any problems, photoshop or something else can always be done.

OldSmoke wrote on 4/14/2015, 3:20 PM

Pan/Crop is what I would use.

videoITguy wrote on 4/14/2015, 5:04 PM

Skip the hardwork and use PhotoDex ProShow Gold before you return to Vegas timeline.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/14/2015, 8:16 PM

Pan and crop doesn't resize, it pans and crops. If you want to do anything besides panning and cropping I'd do it outside Vegas (and saved to a different filename. :) ).

Infact, you may even want to position it inside your 1280x720 frame in your photo editor so all you do is drag/drop the image to the TL in Vegas and everything is done.

PeterDuke wrote on 4/14/2015, 8:46 PM

If you only have a few photos I wouldn't bother to resize them first. I often don't.

Use Pan/Crop to adjust how each photo is displayed.

NormanPCN wrote on 4/14/2015, 9:16 PM

Vegas conforms input media resolution to output resolution for you. So your stills will be resized. If you want to crop to show a smaller portion and/or animate with pan/zooms then just use pan/crop in Vegas. You will want you final render to use Best quality mode so Vegas uses its best(slower) interpolation algorithm to resize the stills.

Vegas performance will be better if the source stills are not really massive in size compared to your project size. So you may want to resize to stills outside of Vegas for performance if you have a lot of large stills going on. For example, in a slideshow project I did I resized the hundreds of photos from 12MP to about 4MP. The 4MP was still larger than the project size, 1080, to allow for good sized crop/zooms. A few I kept at 12MP since they had really deep zooms.

Former user wrote on 4/14/2015, 10:23 PM

I use pan/crop for resizing photos as well.

rraud wrote on 4/15/2015, 9:55 AM

Pan/Crop. From what I understand, it's recommended to have the photos in <.png> file format.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/15/2015, 1:07 PM

png is preferable. Avoid QT if you can, it uses the external QT codec and can cause problems (QT is MOV & TIFF).

Chanimal wrote on 4/15/2015, 4:32 PM

I start with Animoto.com. Then I take the videos into Vegas to edit, combine, re-mix the songs, etc. Here are some samples:

JohnnyRoy wrote on 4/15/2015, 4:55 PM

HD is 1MP, most modern still image cameras are around 12MP. Asking any NLE to resize 12:1 is asking a lot. You'll get the best quality and fastest render times, by resizing the photos in an image editor first. If you're not going to pan and zoom make the 1920x1080. If you are going to pan and zoom make them 2x that.

You might want to check out VASST Still Motion for $9.95 if you plan to do a lot of pan and zoom. It will make very short work of it and work right with you Vegas timeline.

In the interest of full disclosure, I work for VASST and developed Still Motion.

~jr