Slide Show Settings

bigsneeze wrote on 7/2/2003, 6:58 PM
Hi - I'm trying to make a slide show with VF2 with narration and music. The stills have been scanned with various resolutions. I'm using a Dell 4100, 733Mhz machine with a 120GB 7200 HD.
The problem is that if I set the video frame size to greater than 320x240, the cross fades and zooms become choppy, but at 320x240 the most of the stills are pixelated.
As I zoom the pixelation improves.
Some still look good scanned at high resolution (600dpi) and some look pixelated. I noticed a good one was square and the bad one's are generally rectangular.
I've tried experiments scanning the same picture at different resolutions but I can't figure out the magic formula. There are plenty of rendering settings that I don't know what effect they have. Field order, pixel aspect ratio, interleave every second(s).
I'm also not sure how the frame rate interacts with the other settings.
Is my PC or HD not fast enough? Do the stills need to be scanned at a resolution that matches the video frame size? Thanks for any help. - John

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 7/3/2003, 8:57 AM

Your computer should be fast enough -- although RAM is the key here. VideoFactory will probably work with its minimum (though slower), but the more (512 M is ideal) you have, the less likely you'll have issues.

As for still images, use 72 dpi resolution and set the photo size to 720 x 480 pixels. (You may need to crop your image to get these exact dimensions.) This is the same resolution and size as your standard digital video frame. VideoFactory can use higher resolution images but, once it renders to video, all you get is 720 x 480, so no use wasting megaflops downsampling.

The only reason to use a higher resolution image is so that you can pan and zoom into a portion of it. You'll need to do a little math to figure out the optimal size for that image. You figure out how large your image needs to be in order for the zoomed area to be no less thant 720 x 480. That make sense?

Using higher resolution than that is just overkill.
Chienworks wrote on 7/3/2003, 9:19 AM
The choppy playback you're seeing is probably when you are previewing your project from the timeline. Your computer is relatively slow by today's standards and it probably can't generate a realtime display of the transitions at a fast frame rate. However, when the final version is rendered it should play back very smoothly. Try highlighting just a short section around a transition and render this (make movie) as a "Loop region only", then look at the finished file. It should look much better than what you see while previewing.