I'm shooting a film in 720p. For scanned photos, what DPI must I use?

O

oxband

Well-known member
I'm making a film in 30fps, 720p. I'm going to be scanning photos for the project to use in Final Cut Pro, the software I use for editing. What resolution should I scan on? I imagine past a certain point, it doesnt make a difference how detailed it is, and I dont want to do more detailed than necessary since it'll take a long time.

Any thought?
 
A 720P film in pixel dimensions is 1280x720
So if you want your images to remain static with no movement simply scan so that you have enough pixels to cover the X and Y value.
If you want a Ken Burns effect and want to pan around your photo's just make sure that the scan is large enough so that the cropped in portion of the photo is 1:1 onscreen, otherwise you'll have a horrible rasterised look.

As David mentions DPI is irrelevant, think simply in terms of a required amount of pixels
 
4000x4000 for the image will be way too much it'll produce a 45MB image (approx)
The scanner will also do more than you require.
To work out a scan size - open Photoshop or an app like it and create a new document, type in the 4000x4000 in the file dimensions and photoshop will tell you how big the file will be in MB. Then when it comes to scanning you'll be able to figure out how large the file needs to be from it's MB size.
 
What programs are good for this? Any free program I can download? Im looking at Vuescan but it doesnt seem to let you determine pixel count
 
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