Still Image Size ? When Panning/Zooming

Nathan_Shane wrote on 7/17/2004, 4:10 PM
Okay, I just saw a video in which there were numerous still images being panned via rotation, across, head to foot, etc. as well as being zoomed in/out upon and the images remained sharp and in focus and filled the entire frame.

So that got me thinking that in order to do this with such good results, the still image's actual dimension size has to be much larger than the actual project size itself, especially when zooming in, because digitally zooming would start to pixelate the image if it was too small to begin with.

Therefore, I was just wondering what image size everyone typically uses when panning the image so that one can do all this panning, zooming, etc. and have it all still look great.

For instance, if doing a DVD project of 720x480 what should a still image's dimensions be in order to accomplish this panning, zooming stuff effectively? Is this a situation that whatever the project size is set for in Vegas, that if I plan to pan/zoom still images that they should always be ? % larger?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/17/2004, 4:22 PM
Well, it all depends. And that's not what you wanted to hear, was it?

It depends on how far you want to zoom in to the picture and how large the picture is. Let's look at an example. Suppose you have a 4x6 print. Normally if you scanned it at 120dpi you'd get a 720x480 image and this is just sufficient to fill a 654x480 frame. But now you want to zoom in on someone's face and their face is just 1/2": in diameter. You'd need enough resolution for 1/2" to fill the frame vertically, and that would be 960dpi. At this resolution the full scan of the picture would be 5760x3840 pixels. That's a rather large image file!

If instead the smalled portion you wanted to zoom in on was, say about 4x3" then you'd only need 160dpi and the full image would be 960x640 pixels. That's a lot smaller than 5760x3840.

So, as you see, there's no set figure. You need to either figure it out for each picture individually, or pick some intermediate value that works for most pictures without resulting in files that are too huge or zooms that are too pixellated.