Best resolution for stills to be used in a movie

[Hector Vera]

I know you can do animations within Photoshop and at the 1080×1920 aspect ratio, sounds like you are making a YouTube shorts out of those images, right? I have made YouTube shorts in Sony Vegas pro and it does cut out parts of the video clips if they were originally 1920×1080, but I do not think they lower the quality by much since its still similiar aspect ration and quality but reversed. Let me know if you need more input from me on this! 🙂

[Laurie Pepper]

no, this is a feature, not youtube. It’ll probably be in 2k… I still can’t figure out what to do, and there are no good answers online. I’ll try posting in FCPX and see if any filmmakers want to chime in. Thanks.

[Tom Morton]

I would tend to disagree with you slightly, as I believe it makes a lot of sense using high resolution footage even if you’re exporting at lower resolution. For example, I shoot everything in 4K. However, I edit and export at 1080p. However, if I shoot at 1080p to begin with, the final export is not as clear and sharp as when I shoot at 4K.

When 4K is resampled down to 1080p, you get a much sharper, better looking footage then shooting at 1080p to begin with. Another bonus I find is that because I’m exporting at 1080p, I can also crop into a 4K shot without losing quality. Because a 4K shot is 4x the size of a 1080p video, I effectively get the option of zooming in up to 2x (at 2x zoom I’ll get a 1080p shot from a 4K video, which is acceptable). Therefore a 4K shot gives me wide and close shots all at the same time and I can cut to different zoom levels to make the video more interesting. Same applies to stills too 😜

Anyway, my personal rule of thumb is to export the stills at about 2x bigger than required in final export. One of the reasons is that any NLE you use will sample the images and compress them into a slightly lower quality, so at the expense of some GPU power, I prefer to give some extra “elbow room” so that images can be manipulated in Premiere Pro, and when they are resampled they will still maintain a really good quality in post.

[Laurie Pepper]

Thanks so much. I have no control over how the digitized film is handled or what format is used to edit in, etc. I’ve been asked to edit in HD. So when I import my stills into the footage, that’s what happens to them. I’m also supplying the filmmaker with the best quality stills, so I’ll follow your advice and go high, whether that means upscaling digital pics in Topaz or scanning negs and pics at high res.