Using stills - optimum size & rez??

[stevevaus]

Working on a "still heavy" 5 minute vid.

The stills were scanned at 600dpi and imported as jpegs into FCP project. All of a sudden the project has really bogged down - moving the cursor from one point to another can sometimes take 2-3 seconds.

The only thing I can imagine is that the stills are too big. (4-5Mbs each)

Any thoughts and/or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[dlang]

I've had the same problem. if you don't need to zoom all the way in 300 dpi should give you enough space to pan and zoom. I have read that bigger files can bog down. you can also allocate memory for stills. check your manual, that could be the way to ensure good performance at 600dpi. Sorry I can't give you specifics, but hopefully that will lead you in the right direction. Let me know if you get it running smooth with those big files. I took the easy root and just made mine smaller. good luck

 

[Mark Whalen]

600 dpi is fairly large - even if they're saved as JPEGs. I typically resize images to the 150 to 300 dpi range, depending on if I'm using the entire image or just a portion of it.

HTH

 

[Scottdvx100]

More important than the DPI is the actual size. DPI doesn't mean anything in video. You're probably working at 720 x 486. If you're using stills that are 3000 x 2000 then it's wasting a lot of time resizing to 720 x 486 unless you're doing pans and zooms.
If you're just showing the stilsl then resize in Photoshop or other app to match the video size. See FCP help menu for more info on stills.

 

[Petrus]

Like Scottdvx100 says there is absolutelly no point in having hi-rez stills in video projects if there is no panning and zooming inside the frame. The video frame resolution really is ONLY 720x486 pixels in NTSC and there is NO QUALITY GAIN if you import the stills any larger!!! It just bogs the editor down. DPI setting has nothing to do with this, as long as it is something normal that editors can understand. 600, 300 or even 72 DPi are all fine, it is the frame size in pixels that count. And it is 720x486. No bigger.