I am about to start on a project that involves placing over 300 still shots {of different sizes} onto the time line.

I will be scanning these photos then enhancing them in photoshop. Should i scan them at the highest possible resolution then save them as a "large" file?.Will doing this ensure that there are no "black bars" on either side of the photo?

 Any advise would be appreciated.

Iain.

Iain:

I am about to start on a project that involves placing over 300 still shots {of different sizes} onto the time line.

I will be scanning these photos then enhancing them in photoshop. Should i scan them at the highest possible resolution then save them as a "large" file?.Will doing this ensure that there are no "black bars" on either side of the photo?

 Any advise would be appreciated.

Iain.

I don't do slideshows & am not an expert . However, since you've had no rsponse so-far, I'll start the ball rolling:

1) Doesn't Studio automatically downsize to 800 x 600 anyway?

2) Accordibg to my calculator, 300 x 4 secs = 20 mins. Although that's fairly short, Studio might choke with 300 High Res pics on the TimeLine in one go . Maybe 100 x 3, Rendered to File DV-AvI 1st would be better?

I Import  Pics Into Heroglyph as backgrounds for 2D Animations & Into iClone for 3D. Mostly from Google. Some are high Res, which Hero & Studio don't handle well, but IClone does. For Hero, I play around with PSE 4, beforehand & Pan & Zoom in Studio. Adding Sharpen Video Effect in Studio before final Render.

There's quote a bit of info re; handling Pics for Studio, in my Digital Video Editing for Dummies (That's me).Book.

That's my tuppence-worth 

I think there might be another Pihead 1 minute challenge announced at end of Sept. I hope you're going to have time to do one? We're all counting on you to submit. 

Over to the Experts  

Hi Iain

I have done quite a few slideshows this way. I normally scan the pics in at 300dph then when I get them into photoshop set the layer to what ever size you need then make the image fit the layer this gets rid of any black bars or if there are any they are only small and you can zoom in a touch to get rid of them.

 As the the number of stills the most I've done at any one time is 30 I then make an avi video file, when all picts are done just import the avi files back into the timeline and away you go.

 Good luck.

Thanks guys I will certainly take all that advice onboard. The photoshop tip was great also.

The project is a slideshow of family pics from when i was knee high to a grasshopper so some of the pics are "old"

the challenge will be to get them in some sort of order to create a kind of "journey through life" but looking forward to getting started.

Iain.

If you don't plan to do any zooming on your slide show, resolution equal to your project resolution is as good as you can get. If you wish to zoom, and I always do on slide shows, you have to increase the resolution of the slides. Normally twice the project resolution is adequate for the small amount of zoom that I do. I think that small amounts of very slow zoom makes a nice effect, sometimes called the "Ken Burns" effect.

I would suggest that you break your project up into segments of about 50 stills per segment. When each segment is completed, convert it to an avi file, with or without music. When all segments are complete and saved as avi, start a new project and bring all the segments into the timeline. If you haven't already added your music, you can do it at this time, also add the menu if you desire. If you have adequate power in your computer, instead of bringing the avi's into the new project you can copy and paste each of the original projects onto the timeline of a new project. This will allow you to continue editing the original projects, if you desire.

One other suggestion, as you progress through your project, perform a 'save as' frequently and each time increment the file name with a number such as, movie 1, movie 2 etc. In case something goes wrong you can revert back to the previous number without it being a total loss.

Don

Thanks Don.

Good idea keeping the whole project in smaller segments. Last time i done this type of thing {about 100 stills} studio kept crashing when i tried to open the file, it turned out that i had a bad photo in there and had to start the project again checking the photos until i found the rougue one that was causing the problem. I can't imaging that it would be much fun doing the same again with 300+ pics !! When i say "bad photo" it was something to do with the resolution i think because i rescanned it and had no trouble...go figure....

Cheers.

Iain.

I just recently did a show just like you're describing.

I would agree that 300ppi is a minimum you'd want to use. But anything over 600ppi might be overkill, imho. Saving your photos as a "large" file has nothing to do with whether you'll have black bars or not.

If you're doing a standard 4:3 ratio slide show you may find that you'll need to crop the pictures in order to have them fit without having any black bars.That's because cameras used a different ratio than what is common today for slide shows and such.

In photoshop it's easy to do. You can set the crop tool to a specific ratio such as 4:3 or even a specific size if your photos are all the same size. You may also find that part of the enhancing process will include cropping your photos in order to highlight and draw the eye to what's important in the picture. Don't automatically assume that the entire photo is needed just because it was taken that way. 

btw, when I want to do a slide show I use a program made for slide shows. I have ProShow Producer by Photodex. It's pricey but they also have a little brother to it called ProShow Gold. http://www.photodex.com/products/proshowgold.

Joe

I think there's another consideration when determining scanning resolution and that's the size of the original picture. If the picture is small, 300dpi would be fine, but if the picture is an 8X10, a much lower setting would be preferred. Scanning an 8X10 at 300 dpi would give one huge file.

Don

Agree.    It's the final dimensions of the image in pixels that matter, not the DPI. 

I find that my Studio installs since S10 seem to handle 1600x1200 images without breaking a sweat -- that lets me zoom in almost 2:1 on standard-def projects without going below native pixel resolution, and since Studio from 10 onwards seems to aggressively interpolate images to an effective half-resolution, I find that I can zoom in almost 4:1 without starting to experience pixelation.   (1920x1080 in 16:9 projects should also be a "no sweat" proposition).

Get much bigger than 1600x1200 (2 megapixels), though, and things can start to get pretty darned doggy if you have too many images in your project.

And honestly, in a 4:3 standard-def project:  Iif you aren't going to do any pan/zoom on these images *anyway*, anything over 720x540 is wasted--the images are going to end up being (NTSC) 720x480, and that's that.

BittMann

It seems to me that the OP initially doesn't have a choice in what he scans. He said the pics are different sizes. So they could be 8"X10", 3"X5", or even a 35mm slide. The reason why you scan slides at 1200ppi and not 300ppi is to grab more detail.

He can scan an 8X10 at 600ppi and then re-size in photoshop. He's going to do enhancements in PS anyway. To me it makes more sense to do it that way than to scan an 8"X10" at 200ppi just to keep the file size smaller. After all, the scan is not the final picture that will go into Studio.

You can always crop the photo (I recommended that in my first post) or re-size it in photoshop to get it to a manageable size.

Thankyou to all that have commented.

Very much appreciated. I'll be starting my project this weekend and referring back to this thread.

Cheers.

Iain. 

"""And honestly, in a 4:3 standard-def project:  Iif you aren't going to do any pan/zoom on these images *anyway*, anything over 720x540 is wasted--the images are going to end up being (NTSC) 720x480, and that's that.   BittMann """

Why would he not want to do pan/zoom in standard def?

 jeffegg2

jeffegg2:

"""And honestly, in a 4:3 standard-def project:  Iif you aren't going to do any pan/zoom on these images *anyway*, anything over 720x540 is wasted--the images are going to end up being (NTSC) 720x480, and that's that.   BittMann """

 

Why would he not want to do pan/zoom in standard def?

 jeffegg2

I don't pretend to infer the reasons why one would or wouldn't choose to to so.  Why do you ask?

Regardless, IF the user does not intend to zoom in on an image, then (in the aforementioned 4:3 standard-def project), anything over 720x540 is wasted.   It's not that you can't use higher-definition images (I almost exclusively use "2MP" images -- 1600x1200 -- here, so I *can* zoom in quite a bit with no quality loss), but the fact is, my 1600x1200 images, my 6400x4800 images, and my 720x540 images look to have almost *exactly* the same "quality" when outputting to NTSC 720x480. (And honestly, I can't really tell the difference between 720x540 and 640x480 source,  except in *very* specific circumstances--sometimes, due to the vertical resize required, 640x480 images can actually look better when being resized to 720x480 when compared to 720x540 images, but that's another discussion entirely.)

BittMann

As the world is moving away from 4:3 towards 16:9 and High Definition I am now scanning any photographs I need at 1920 x 1080 or higher (at an aspect ratio of 16:9) and have set our digital cameras to record at the highest resolution settings. This way I do not need to scan the photographs again and if necessary and can crop to a 4:3 aspect ratio if required.

Paul W. H