Still size for AVCHD time line ??

knockatoone wrote on 5/2/2010, 10:12 AM
Is there a correct size still to bring to the time line. I have read in other video editing programs that major stalls in rendering can occur if stills are too big. This is a concern for SD time lines as well. You usually want a still big enought to move around on (zoom / pan) and to have room for transitions . If the out put is going to be HD 1920 x 1080 frame size is that a good size for a still or is there some max or min size or ???

Comments

Byron K wrote on 5/2/2010, 11:36 AM
You usually want a still big enought to move around on (zoom / pan) and to have room for transitions.
Yes, you want to make the still just large enough it's the correct resolution at the end of the zoom or pan,

If the out put is going to be HD 1920 x 1080 frame size is that a good size for a still or is there some max or min size or ???
It depends. If you're zooming in on an area approx 1/4 of the area on the 1920x1080 then your picture size will have to be 4x larger than the frame size.

When I had to zoom in a lot on an area of a picture on the slower machine I re-sized the original or wide angle photo just 1.5x larger than the frame size and use this photo to start zooming in. Then create another higher resolution feathered edge file w/ transparent alpha of the final zoomed subject at the proper frame size. Have these on separate tracks an align the two. Depending on what the subject is, you can blur the background and it kind of makes a neat 3D-ish effect too.

Here's an example of the feathered transparent alpha I was referring to. So you dont have to watch the whole boring video you can fwd to the following points in the video: (;
-At the beginning the 1st two orchids
-Bonzai tree @ 0:37
-Floral arrangment @ 1:48
david_f_knight wrote on 5/2/2010, 12:57 PM
I don't know what upper resolution limit there may be for still photos in Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum, but I know you can use photos with up to 2048x1536 resolution. I've read in this forum that there may also be an issue with the format that the photos are in. I know some people have had problems with Vegas crashing with huge megapixel jpg photos; Vegas might work better with png or bmp photos.

I appreciate Byron K's desire for the ultimate in quality, but this was my experience:

The first video I made with VMS9P used 244 still photos. All of them had 2048x1536 resolution. I started out trying to scale each photo in a photo editor to the ideal size for my video. I quickly discovered that that just wasn't going to be feasible for 244 photos! (Also, I knew I was going to render my video at several different resolutions, like 1920x1080 for an AVCHD DVD and 1280x720 for the internet, so there really wasn't any one ideal resolution to scale my still photos to... I knew I didn't want to reduce them to, say 1920x1080 outside Vegas and then scale them a second time in Vegas. Each time you scale your photos, you reduce the image quality... much better to stay with the original and scale just once if possible.) So, after about two photos, I decided the heck with it and I'll just let Vegas deal with all of it and I used all the photos in Vegas with their native resolution. I don't regret going that route; I am quite satisfied with the quality.

It was very nice of Byron K to provide an example of what he wrote about. Looks good, by the way! That lets people really understand and to see for themselves whether something is right for them. So, in that spirit, here's my example of letting Vegas do all the scaling from photos in their native resolution of 2048x1536.

Additional thought:
There's another issue about photo resolution, and that has to do with aliasing problems. With very high resolution photos panned or zoomed within Vegas, there may be problems with flickering of thin horizontal lines. If so, then, as with any aliasing problem, high frequency content must be filtered out beforehand. With photos, that means applying a small blur to them (if maintaining the original resolution) or simply by reducing their resolution, as Byron K suggested, before utilizing them within Vegas.
knockatoone wrote on 5/2/2010, 8:10 PM
WOW !! what great videos - also really shows off how important the background music is in making them really pop - I will watch again for sure .
Sounds like the size of the still is not a concern in VMS. [ FYI -Photoshops Elements allows you to batch resize any group of photos - to a size you specify .... should you ever need to]. I have used a few 3680 x 2070 resolution pictures in an AVCHD VMS time line and had no problems with my first render - and they were jpg... Thanks for your thoughts on this subject - as I said - in other editors you get a lot of cautions about how too large a still will crash a render - appears VegasMS handles them just fine . K