BMP requires the use of quicktime components... so I would not recommend that (unenecessary overhead). I tend to use PSD, PNG or JPG.

If you have the disc space, then use 24-bit .PNG and keep them in .PNG format. It is the "native" image file format in Vegas and is lossless. I suppose if space is an issue then you could convert them to JPG, but you take a quality hit by doing so.

John

I scan to photoshop, batch convert to png, and drop right into Vegas

I also use png, but unless doing extreme zooming , i down size the pic, for some reason (at least for me) Vegas doesn't like a bunch of large png files.

BMP requires quicktime? That's a surprise since Windows has ben using BMP files at least since version 3.0. I haven't used a BMP file in a while though. Maybe Quicktime makes itself the default handler when you install it.

Nevertheless, BMP is an uncompressed format so the quality will be good but the file size can get huge.

JPEG is lossy, and doesn't support alpha channels, but file size can be small. JPEG can be acceptable if the image is noisy to begin with.

PNG is compressed but lossless and it supports an 8 bit alpha channel so you can have 256 levels of transparency. It doesn't compress to be very small. It is the default format for Vegas.

PSD files work well too but they can get big. You need to turn on "Maximize Backwards Compatibility" in Photoshop. Vegas doesn't have access to PSD layers but if you've turned on the compatibility switch then Vegas will see the file in the state you saved it in (it will see whatever was visible and whatever was transparent). The advantage of using PSD is that you can go back to photoshop and manipulate the layers and text.

Vegas can handle other formats as well, like tiff, gif, targa, etc. Generally, PNG can do what these do and is a good all around choice.

Vegas seems to have quirks when using lots of files or files of large pixel dimensions. I think you've got to be pushing the envelope pretty hard but people run into trouble when making slide shows with tons of large images.

Rob Mack

PNG is the format of choice, but it is large. JPEG quality is fine as long as you use top-quality compression settings. I'd be amazed if you could detect any difference in the finished video. Of course you don't want to ever save to JPEG unless you don't ever plan to edit the picture again (same issue as when saving video to MPEG-2).

Always save at a resolution that is a little higher than your project resolution, and if you plan to zoom in, then you need to increase the resolution at which you save so that, when zoomed all the way in, you still have at least the number of pixels required by your project. Thus, for 720x480 (NTSC DV) and a 2x maximum zoom, you want to save at a resolution of 1440x960 or greater.

When rendering still photos, always use the "Best" setting (found under the Custom button in the "Render As" dialog. That is what this option is there for ("best" is somewhat of a misnomer; it is not any better when simply rendering SD DV to SD output).

Thanks.
I'll give the png's a try.

Most of these old psd pictures are layered-up heavily with restoration paths and the like. They range from 8 to about 24mb each.

That batch conversion app will come in handy. I've got 546 PSDs to convert as of today.

..........They range from 8 to about 24mb each.
Ouch ,, could be a problem

Well the originals do. I've been bringing them down to about 1.5 to 2.0 mb as bmp. It's just the layers.

I will have to consider the image size for zooming though.

Thanks for all the insight.

If you are going to batch process them, and if you don't need to preserve the resolution for something else, you'll end up with far faster performance in Vegas if you down-res them according the criteria I provided in the previous post. As others have said, Vegas can get pretty slow if you put dozens of super-high-res pics on the timeline.

BMP requires quicktime? That's a surprise since Windows has ben using BMP files at least since version 3.0. I haven't used a BMP file in a while though. Maybe Quicktime makes itself the default handler when you install it.

That's what I found out when on one of my PC's all my BMPs turned out black. The only difference between that PC and others that I was using was the version of quicktime (it was using 4.x... my others 6.x). When I upgraded the version of Quicktime my BMP's worked.

So... to me at least... that proved the BMP's were being processed via the Quicktime components. Could have been something else.. I guess. What do you think?

My guess would be that something in the older version of Quicktime was interfering with Window's processing of BMP images. I've been able to work with BMP files on computers for decades without Quicktime installed at all.

Interesting.... I must admit I was surprised when I discovered the solution to this problem was in the Quicktime components side of things. I appreciate BMP is a format that is natively on windows - and has been forever.

My expeirence seemed to point out that at least as far as Vegas was concerned it used the quicktime components to process BMP images. I don't know if that is normal - or if it only happens when you have the quicktime authoring components installed. As I have them installed on every PC I use Vegas on - I therefore tend to distrust the use of BMP's within my projects and I always convert them to something else (PNG).

If you are interested my original post about this problem can be found here...and it's a little different than I described above. The problem was that I did not have quicktime installed on one of my machines (it was not related to the version installed).

It would be nice to find out from Sony what was really going on here.

I absolutely refuse to install QuickTime on my computers and work with BMP files all the time in Vegas. TIFF files will not load, however, without QuickTime installed. Perhaps you are thinking of that? Or, perhaps not.

I'd be surprised too. I just wouldn't expect Vegas to rely on Quicktime for bmp support. However, since we all probably have quicktime on our systems, I don't think anyone will uninstall it to test things out.

I wonder if this is caused if quicktime sets itself as the default bmp viewer. It seems especially odd that one version of quicktime would need to be updated, however, I also see that Photoshop gives me a lot of choices for saving BMPs. Maybe Quicktime writes the files in one specific way that makes Quicktime required later on.

In the end it's just a curiosity, and a good thing to file away for the next time something goes wrong in a render. I've decided over the past month that I'm not going to let new programs hijack Window's default file associations. This includes Quicktime. As far as I'm concerned it can only open Mov and pict files.

Rob Mack

No, there's no confusion. It was BMP files. I think the problem may be caused by letting quicktime grab the file associations when you install it.

I was just looking at the save options for bmp files in photoshop. I didn't realize there were choices! So maybe Quicktime is fiddling with the bmp files, or maybe it's whatever application created them in the first place.

I've had no trouble with quicktime, but I don't allow it, or photoshop for that matter, to become the default handler for common file types. I recently discovered that if Photoshop is the default handler for jpegs, for instance, it can actually crash Windows Explorer. You have to have a lot of jpegs in a folder but evidently Explorer will query Photoshop for additional info or thumbnails or something. Eventually Explorer just locks up.

Similarly, you shouldn't have a psd image displayed in Explorer's viewer while you're editing it in photoshop. You can end up with mangled permissions. Adobe "solved" this by removing the dll that allows explorer to preview psd files.

If you HAVE to handle large still files in Vegas turning off Thumbnails can help a bit. I've dropped 120 Mbyte 16 bit targa files onto the Vegas T/L and rendered without anything actually melting but it was like wadding through treacle. I wonder if Gearshift could be coaxed into handle still image proxies?

See thing is if you're rendering out to HD then you might need to be able to work from the higher res images and if you keep them still then the render times are pretty decent, Vegas only renders the frame once, you'll see it think hard on the first frame after a new image and then zip along until you cut to a new photo.

Bob.

Liam,

I too have refused to install Quicktime on my computer because of it's insistance on hijacking one's computer. The same goes for Real. To play either of those files I use:

Quicktime Alternative

or

Real Alternative

Both play in Windows Media Player Classic and work best when you download the file to the desktop to play it although you can configure the popular browsers to open windows to play the files as well.

John

I haven't had any problems with Quicktime messing up file associations for a long time now. I think since version 5 Apple got a lot smarter and politer about this.

These days my biggest problem is Microsoft! It seems like every time there is a windows or media player update, all my image file associations get switched to Microsoft Photo Editor instead of the programs i want to use. Sometimes just a reboot will switch them all. It's terribly frustrating. These days i'm pretty much resigned to right-mouse-button clicking on every file i want to open and choosing "Open with", then selecting the program i want. I've just about given up on associations.

I've got a project with some Digital Hotcakes *.mov files using Alpha channels (which I much prefer instead of using a 650MB tga still sequence). I'm on a newly built computer with a fresh WIndows XP x64 install, and low and behold, the QuickTime 7 I just installed isn't cutting it. Opening my veg files got a popup warning that QT is not properly installed.

It's apparently because the "authoring components" that Vegas looks for are not found in QT7. And as DSE said in an earlier post, there is no custom install where you can specify authoring components. They (whatever Vegas looks for) simply aren't there!

Solution is to install an older version of QuickTime (like 6.5.2). Here's the link for it. It was buried on the Apple website (tech support for users with older computers), but I eventually found it. I recommend backing this up to a CD so that if you ever do a fresh OS install, you won't be hosed when you try to edit your projects with QT media in them.

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime652forwindows.html