Thanks. Still images and their properties, for sure, are not my strength. I am working with quite a few scanned images on this project so I will just use the 32 bit save to be on the safe side.

PNGs can have I think 8 or 16 bit alpha which is much better than some formats. Unless you intend to pan / crop the images there is no point in going over the native DV res that you're working with.

I had one strange experince with some very HiRes stills. Firstly they were about 15 MBytes per image as tiffs and putting a few of those on the timeline certainly slowed VV down. Problem is that VV uses QT to decode tiffs, converting to png and reducing res to half improved things no end.

Bu the strange thing was images had a grey backdrop with very slight fall off. On preview you could see banding in the backdrop, when it was rendered it was perfect.

I scan at the defaults for my little Canon scanner which is about 200dpi for color photos. I probably should go higher, but, when zooming the photo really isn't up there long enough for any distortion to appear. In some strange way, a slow zoom that begins to look a tad blocky just as it fades into the next pic looks good. I sure others would gasp at that idea, but, nevertheless, I try to avoid scanning at huge resolutions when the picture has only so much detail anyway. 200dpi makes for fast scanning, too.

If you don't need an alpha channel for transparancy (and it certainly seems like you don't), then use 24 bit. The extra 8 bits are simply a waste that takes up more drive space and will slow down rendering time significantly.

Yes, 24 bit seems to be the best overall choice. I guess that's why Photoshop preselects that depth when the selection box opens. As you said, that should save me a lot of time. As usual, the knowledge and professionalism here is second to none. Thanks for the replies.