I've put images that were at some staggering res into Vegas and that was back in the V4 days, one of my first commercial projects. I can't remember now how big they were but the tiff files would have been around 100MBs, certainly well beyond 4K.
On top of that I've done projects with literally thousands of 4K images from my Nikon slide scanner.
The only hard limit I'm aware of in Vegas is maximum project and output res is 2K. That said when you get into those over the top resolutions you might want to turn off the thumbnails or things do get kind of bogged down.

Bob.

I've used .PNG panorama images in excess of 10,000 x 3,000 in a Vegas project. You better have a lot of RAM...

You might be referring to dpi normally 300 dpi the same as print. Some say this is not an issue because you are rendering to a pixel anyway to me it does make a Hugh difference especially when you are working with text that have bevels and stuff on Scand images you may have to add a Gaussian blur

DPI is meaningless in video. It is all about the pixels.

Hi John

I hear what you are saying but why is it if I do my graphics in 300 dpi I see better results in the final render anything under that looks bad

So what am I screwing up?

Rory

sorry to harp on some more but!!

Scanners work in dpi for the graphic industry even from tranny’s so surly when you scan this plays a major part it simply has to

When you work in a NLE the output methods are different but crap in crap out has to apply

Look I would really like to understand this issue. It comes up often I don’t get it when I can see the difference with my eyes

I explained this all in a thread a long time ago:

Scanner dpi etc.

You definitely need to read that (there are some other good posts in that thread that are worth reading).

That post above explains how to translate between pixels and dots per inch (dpi). The reason dpi is totally meaningless for video, as John_Cline has already correctly pointed out, is that it describes what happens on a piece of paper.

Video doesn't fit onto a piece of paper.

You need a certain number of dots on a newspaper or magazine page in order to make a picture appears. The closer together these dots (i.e., the more dots per inch), the better the picture quality and sharpness. To get the whole story, click on the link above and read.

To the original poster (michaelshive), HD is 1920x1080 (the 1440x1080 HDV is really 1920x1080, but the pixels are not square, so they get stretched back out when displayed). Thus, you want to capture from your still camera, or scan using a scanner so that you end up with a file that has at least this number of pixels.

The size of the resulting file means absolutely nothing. Someone has already mentioned TIFF, and someone else mentioned JPEG, and another mentioned PNG. Each of these uses different compression and therefore will create different size files for the same picture.

However -- and here's a key point -- when that file is brought into Vegas (or any other application), the picture will be expanded out to its original size in RAM memory, regardless of the size of the original file. Thus, you can save a JPEG file using ridiculously high compression. That compression will create compression artifacts that will make the photo look bad, but it will fit into a really, really small file. However, when you put that photo on the Vegas timeline, it will take the same amount of RAM memory as the same photo that was stored in PNG or TIFF or JPEG using no compression.

Finally, if you are going to zoom into the photo, then you need to have more resolution in the original photo than 1920x1080. If you don't, then as you zoom, the photo will become blurry and pixelated, just the same as if you zoomed into your video. This is one difference between using high-res still photos and using video: since the still photos can have higher resolution than the video, you can zoom into them without seeming to suffer any loss of quality. However, to make this work, you have to start with a photo that has at least 1920x1080 (for 1080 HD) times the zoom factor. If you plan to zoom into the photo so that the X and Y pan crop box is exactly one half of the original in each direction (i.e., 1/4 the original size), then you want a photo that is 3840 x 2160.

[Edit] P.S. At the risk of annoying people by quoting myself again, there is another post further down in the thread I reference above, that explains a lot more about dpi and why it IS important for printing. This may help you further understand why it is NOT important -- totally irrelevant, in fact -- for video:

DPI for Printing

> " why is it if I do my graphics in 300 dpi I see better results in the final render...?"

Because 300dpi will produce more pixels than 72dpi, and 600dpi will produce more than 300 ....

The smaller the original source graphic, the higher dpi you'll need when scanning to produce a satisfactory image to fill a video screen that might be anything from say 240 x 180 to 1920 x 1080.

You guys are great

i have printed this out as i will have to read it more than once to fully grasp the content thanks already it makes more sense
thanks John ,Peter,john ,

"Scanners work in dpi for the graphic industry even from tranny’s so surly when you scan this plays a major part it simply has to

OK, let's say we have a 4"w x 3"h photograph. If we scan it at 72dpi, then the resulting image will be 288 x 216. 4 x 72 = 288, 3 x 72 = 216. (Not nearly big enough for even SD video.) If you scan it at 300dpi, the image will be 1200 x 900. (Not quite big enough for HD video.) 600dpi would be 2400 x 1800. The same is true if we create a graphic in Photoshop using inches and DPI. Create a 4" x 3" graphic at 300 DPI and it will be 1200 x 900. 6" x 4" graphic at 600dpi would be 2400 x 1800. For video purposes, one should create graphics in Photoshop by specifying image dimensions in pixels, not inches. DPI only matters when you're scanning a fixed size image and want to specify its final size in pixels. Scanning a 4" x 3" photo at 600 dpi will result in exactly the same size image (in pixels) as scanning a 8" x 6" photo at 300dpi.

Now, if you create a graphic in Photoshop by specifying the pixels, let's say 2400 x 1800, you can specify a DPI value of anything, it doesn't matter. It can be 72, 150, 300, or even 10,000 DPI, it's still 2400 x 1800 and that's ALL that matters to Vegas.

When you're adding text to an image in Photoshop, it's always better to add the text to a large image and it will look better (smoother) because Vegas will anti-alias it even further when you import it. Graphics or photo scans always look smoother when they are scaled down in size and look worse when they have to be scaled up.

Having once had to deal with a high end graphics house that I wanted to scan some large format negs I can understand the confusion we face and yet in their world it makes perfect sense.

You want it scanned for a certain print size, say A0. Now how many DPI do you want that print at. I asked them how many pixel by how many pixels the files from the scans would be at and I might as well have spoken to them in ancient greek. I should perhaps mention that a A0 scan at 300dpi would have cost $300!

On the other hand the graphics industry seems to have decided that video is 72dpi which doesn't seem to make much sense to us at all. I think they arrived at this figure perhaps because a typical TV at a typical viewing distance looks about the same quality as a page printed at 72dpi. All of which is only guessing on my part but it's the only logical explaination I can think of.

Bob.

That’s it 72 Dpi was set and it looked crappy

I am saving this thread because I know a few guys that need to read this [included myself ]

Rory

scantips.com
LOTS of useful information.

Mike

I will scan slides at 1200 dpi and convert to jpeg to reduce the 5 meg size to about 550k which Vegas loves. Depending on the initial quality of the slides (20+ years old, focus and sharpness and contrast) you still can't zoom in too much and if you chop to 16 x 9 it will be less. 2k x 2k works well with HDV but going in more than 8 to 1 zoom is still pushing a bit especially if you crop to 16 x 9. There are other anomolies which I can't explain that some photographs are absolutely brilliant while others are real turkeys with "flickadillies" and "Fuzzies" as they are being panned. Size is the big deal when importing into Vegas as sometimes when you crop just a little bit all kinds of wierd things happen. You might have to try different settings to clear up these anomolies.
JJK

Thanks for all the responses everyone! I'm not all too familiar with 2K but in terms of pixels 2K is 2048 × 1536, correct?

Just out of curiosity, you said "If we know we'll be going deep, it'll still never cross 2.5K, as Vegas doesn't work with anything beyond 2K"...what if you were cutting it in FCP / Motion? Does FCP have the same limitation? And if there is no limitation in FCP / Motion would it be possible to get higher quality / deeper zooms?

It's the output resolution of Vegas that's limited to 2K, not the maximum image size you can drop on the timeline.
There was a thread about a year or two ago on the maximum input size and I seem to recall it was around 8K x 8K.
I just tried making an 8K x 6K image in Photoshop, dropping some digital stills on it and saving it in PNG format. Vegas did handle it.
I also tried dropping a 3K x 2K image on the timeline and doing a deep zoom on it.
I could get down to about 350 x 200 before it started to degrade.

Mike

Vegas has a max project resolution of 2048x2048, which is actually bigger than 2k. What Spot said about not crossing 2.5k is true for video media, not stills.

FCP has a 2k limitation as far as project output size. Motion can support larger than 2k project resolutions. So can After Effects, which is the industry standard in motion graphics. Your best bet is to use After Effects because of the excellent motion blur parameters (and because you can easily round trip the project to Vegas).