Resizing photos?

Digeeedad wrote on 12/19/2006, 8:05 PM

VERY new to VMS and editing! If I import photos into VMS do I need to resize them? If so to what dimensions? Does the default "project size of 720x480 have any relationship to resizing? If that is a yes, should I resize to stay within these parameters? (I use Photoshop 7)

If I scan old photographs which have dimensions less than the 720x480 will they show up on a TV screen as very small?

Thanks
Cutr

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/19/2006, 8:51 PM

Vegas does the "right thing" and resizes your photos for you to the largest they can be while still being completely displayed within the frame. Try it and see! This means that it automatically shrinks large photos and stretches smaller ones. Generally you don't have to do anything other than place the picture on the timeline and let Vegas handle it for you.

There are two situations in which you might want to do something though. If you want the picture to fill the frame completely, instead of being completely within the frame, then bring up pan/crop, right-mouse-button click inside the cropping rectangle, and choose "match output aspect". This will stretch the picture out just far enough so that the frame falls completely inside the picture.

The other situation is that if your photos are very large, or you have very many of them, then Vegas can get bogged down handling all that data. In this case you may want to resize them smaller so that Vegas has to do less work. 720x480 isn't the right size because DV uses rectangular pixels and photographs amost always use square pixels. A 720x480 still image would be too wide for the frame and would leave black bars at the top and bottom. The best size to match a 720x480 project is 655x480. I could give you all the math to back that up, but it's boring. Instead, just try creating a 655x480 image and see how well it fits.

Digeeedad wrote on 12/20/2006, 7:06 PM

Thanks Chienworks for the informative and VERY helpful response!

I will definately "experiment" a bit using the tips you gave me.

Happy Holidays!

Curt

MovieMontage wrote on 12/29/2006, 3:13 PM

Yea, cept for if you have a bunch of oddly shaped pictures you'll have a very shotty lookin project as their will be a good amount a black around your pictures, in different places. If you're looking for a more uniform look, try and edit the pictures in a seperate app, microsoft paint always does the trick for me, happy holidays.

Paul Mead wrote on 12/29/2006, 8:47 PM

No need for a separate app. Just use pan/crop in VMS.

Also, Microsoft has a power-tool that will allow you to do resizing from Windows Explorer. I remember reading about it somewhere in this forum. It has limited options for the resulting size, but it is quick and easy.

RMD wrote on 1/8/2007, 10:32 PM

I have done this a lot, and it depends what the final display is going to be. No adjustment is required for Computer display, but if you plan to burn DVD for display on a TV - then for the jpegs, DO NOT maintain aspect ratios, and SET pixels to DV (NTSC in my case). This will play back JPEGs clearly without ghosting on a standard TV, assuming you output to MPEG(2) and burn DVD ...

This is easier than trying to resize all those jpegs. Good luck with burning a few demos to see the difference.