Solved Picture (.jpg) format - how to maintain high quality output when rendering still images

Hi,

I always modify the original format of camera pictures to get them down to 640x480. This format permits a faster rendering time. I notice that my projects show low quality in the pictures once the project is rendered and ready to show. What would be the ideal format to assure good quality in project playback and reasonable rendering time?

Thanks for the info.

Hi Michel,

I usually double the resolution of stills over video. I normally produce HD 1920x1080 (16:9) video, so I format stills at 3840x2160. This keeps the stills at the same aspect ratio 16:9, allows the codec to render as high as the video without being overloaded, and also allow some wiggle room if I want to apply some pan & crop or track motion, to some of the still frames. If I were to produce 640x480 video, I would probably use 1280x960 as a format resolution on the stills.

I also use .png files whenever possible, as I think Movie Studio handles the resolution and color a bit better than .jpg.

You should not be downgrading any still image to 640x480 - I've never heard of anyone ever doing that before !

Leave all your images at their original resolution and only crop them with with Event Pan/Crop or Track Motion, as Eagle Six has suggested.
Then you will get a high quality video.

Hi George,

Thanks for your answer, I appreciate it

Michel

Hi Derek,

Before there was Dr. Zen, I would usually communicate with Sony's tech. services. That's where I got the info telling the rendering time would be much faster if the format was down at 640x480. My projects usually have a got mix of photos/videos. My actual project is at 2hours with a 5 g. format. I presume of the format if I insert pictures in their original format. I might have to split in 3 DVDs, probably; do you have a better solution?

Also is there a codec to install before installing MSP13

Thanks...Michel

Michel wrote: Hi George,

Thanks for your answer, I appreciate it

Michel

You are certainly welcome Michel,

I wanted to follow-up with my exact workflow. Before starting a shoot, I set the resolution of my Nikon camera to 4608x2592, which is the maximum 16:9 resolution for that camera. That assures me I will be taking the maximum quality. Once in a while I use a still from the shoot to make prints, and I always like the highest resolution the camera can produce, as originals, for prints.

If I only use a few stills in the video, I most likely will leave them at this high resolution, unless there is a reason to perform some correction before adding them to the timeline.

If I have many stills from the shoot that I will add, most likely some of these will require me to run them through PaintShopPro to make color corrections, cropping, and other required improvements, along with renaming them, and while there I will resize them all to 3840x2160 and save them as .png files. Occasionally I will use the larger resolution of 4608x2592, because I want to perform a massive Track Motion FX /pan on them in Movie Studio.

I would rather take a hit in time to render, than reduced quality, even with a large project. The rendered file size will remain the same whether I use high resolution stills or lower resolution stills, for the same 1920x1080 project.

Everyone has a different method of workflow, but this is what has worked out well for me.

Hi Michel

I have heard some strange things come out of Sony's Support office before.
There is a mixture of highly experienced and in-experienced support staff working there, so it can be a lucky dip as to who answers your questions.
Anyway, that's in the past now.

The file size of the media you import into a project, has little or no effect on the file size that exports/renders from the timeline.
Your output render "Make Movie" settings and bit rates, is what makes a video file size smaller or larger.

If you are making DVDs, I have an in-depth tutorial that shows exact how to compress/fit a video onto a single DVD.
If you use Dual Layer DVDs, you can fit more video onto a single disc as well.

Please read/watch this tutorial:
How to Compress and Fit a Long Video onto a DVD

Hi Derek,

Your Tutorial on using the Bit calculator was excellent and permitted me to fit my 1, 50 minutes project on just one DVD and also included my original photos; thanks again Derek really happy of the results.

Michel

I'm glad you worked it out

At one time, using large size photos would choke on older versions of Movie Studio. That's probably the reason Sony support said to reduce the size of the photo.