Picture Resolution Help

PH125 wrote on 5/24/2005, 7:45 PM

I'm starting a large project for which I'll be scanning about 300 6x4 35mm prints. I was going to scan at about 500 dpi, giving me a res of about 2800 x 1900. These photos will have pan and zoom applied to them for effect. Just wondering what resolution everyone else uses for these types of pictures. Also, what is the best format? I am thinking of just going with PSD since I'm using PS to scan, and it saves the quickest, and is pretty much the same size as TGA. I'm not going to use PNG because the save times for PS were less than acceptable.

Comments

rs170a wrote on 5/24/2005, 8:06 PM

Since video is 720 x 480 and your scans will give you 2800 x 1900, that means a zoom of up to 4X (400%) without any quality loss. If this is acceptable, then stick with your settings, otherwise modify accordingly.
PSD is fine as a format. The biggest advantage I find with it and Photoshop is that's the default format. Why bother adding extra keystrokes when you don't have to :-)

Mike

johnmeyer wrote on 5/24/2005, 8:22 PM

If your project is NTSC, the project resolution is 720x480. If you are going to zoom in to a magnification of 2x (which is a pretty healthy zoom) then you need originals at 1440x960. You can do the math for other zoom ratios. Vegas definitely bogs down when you put lots of high-res pictures on the timeline, so don't scan at too much higher a resolution than you have to. Also, as I reported in a thread a few days ago, the scaling that must take place between high resolution images and the 720x480 final resolution can increase the severity of "flicker" artifacts, so this is another reason not to scan at higher resolution than you need.

Fortunately, you already understand the most important thing, which is that dpi is irrelevant; instead the total resolution is the figure to look at. Thus, you should scan prints that are physically large (like 8x10) at lower dpi resolution, and prints that are small (like wallet-sized prints) at higher dpi resolution.

As for file formats, there are other people here that understand better which formats work best with Vegas. If you search on Spot's user name in the last 30 days, and use the search term TIFF, you will find at least one or more posts where he has answered this question.

PH125 wrote on 5/24/2005, 8:26 PM

Thanks for the input. I rendered out a few images as i would have them in the presentation, and they looked fine when previewed on a standard TV. So i guess i'll stick with the PSDs at 2800x1900.