Problems with large TIFF files

farss wrote on 6/3/2003, 6:56 AM

Not so much a problem as I've worked around it but I'd like to know if anyone else has run into this as well.

Job I'm working on at the moment involved bringing about 15 tiff stills into the time line. They are about 3000x2000 pixels, file size 35 MB, as I added more of them onto the timeline VV just got slower and slower to the point of being unusable. I've used the same system to edit 90 min of video so no problem there (I hope!). Anyway I ended up running these stills through Photoshop and converting them to JPEGs at the same res and now things are much better, although still a bit slow and the project takes about 3 minutes to open. Also at times I've run out of virtual RAM according to Win2K (I have 512 MB of real RAM).

I don't think its really a problem, an associate had much the same issue with FCP except worse, so maybe its just some good advise to get the image size down as small as you can. Once I had the stills where I wanted them against the audio I just rendered them out and bought them into a new project, all well from then on.

The other issue I struck was with the backgrounds on some of them, they are a neutral grey with a very slight drop off accross them, when rendered the background has bands accross it, not that noticeable but it would be nice if they were'nt there.

Comments

efiebke wrote on 6/3/2003, 7:33 AM

Gosh, I'm no expert!

Had the same problem with larger tiff files, though.

Recently, I started converting them to png files. Vegas, apparently, is optimized for png files. Anyway, the program doesn't seem to be slowed down nearly as much when using the png files. What's also cool about png files is that you can have a transparent background that is easily translated into the Vegas 4 program!!!

Try converting the large tiff files to png. Also, somewhere in the manual it mentions that the Vegas is optimized (or similar word) for png files. It's well worth a read!

Just some thoughts. . .

Chienworks wrote on 6/3/2003, 7:37 AM

Those pictures are enormous! If you're not planning on zooming in to smaller areas of them, then you should resize them to something resembling 654x480 (NTSC) or 786x576 (PAL) before putting them on the timeline. JPG at low compression is ok and my personal preference. Lots of other people will suggest using PNG on the assumption that it is lossless (it's not necessarily so). The other problem with TIFF images is that Vegas doesn't handle them natively; it loads QuickTime components to decode them. This adds quite a bit to the processing time.

farss wrote on 6/3/2003, 7:44 AM

Thanks for all the advice, I had pretty much worked through it myself although I didn't remember about VV4 using PNG as a native format.
By the way I do believe that PNG is lossless, its biggest problem is that Photoshop doesn't handle it as well as it should and unlike JPG (which is ALWAYS lossy) you can't use it to compress.

The other big plus to PNG is 8 bit alpha, this can avoid the aliasing around objects over a background.

Chienworks wrote on 6/3/2003, 11:02 AM

JPEG can also be lossless. There is a provision for it in the JPEG spec, but the file size isn't that much smaller than uncompressed so it's seldomly used.

At lower compression levels JPEG can be extremely accurate to uncompressed originals in all but the darkest shadows, and even there it's pretty good. It can even survive several generations of edits and re-saves with negligible additional loss. Even at these low compression levels JPEG files still tend to be smaller than PNG and are often more universally usable.

EdRob wrote on 6/3/2003, 1:57 PM

Here is the link to a free PNG Photoshop plug-in that gives better control saving PNG files than the native PS plug-in. Lossless and Lossy is available.
http://www.fnordware.com/superpng
ER