Editing stills in Premiere Pro

[Vince Becquiot]

You are are working in Square Pixels, you should export at 640×480 (Don’t forget about the safety margins)

Vince

[Pete Fair]

Dear Vincent,

Thank you very much for your post. I tried the aspect ratio and it’s good! However the picture quality it is rather poor. At 640 x 480 the image magnification does not hold well. I would like to increase the picture quality since the final product will be shown in a large screen.

I am using images originally shot in 35mm slide film and scanned at 2820 (pixels per inch) I would appreciate your feedback regarding the latter. Best, Pete.

[Mike Velte]

If you plan on pan and scan for the stills reduce image size in Photoshop to about 1200 x 900 using Bicubic Sharper. In Premiere, deselect “Default scale to frame size” in Preferences>General.

[Pete Fair]

Dear Mike,

Thank you for your kind reply, it indeed helps me a lot. On the other hand, when a mentioned that the film will be shown on a big screen a meant: a THEATER screen (film festival) Therefore, I yet wonder whether the resolution you recommended will be OK (?) and match the rest of the footage –all regular 16mm film and transfered to Digibeta. Also, you are right: all my stills have a slow zoom-in. In addition to it, could you please briefly explain what deselecting to “Default scale to frame size” does to the pictures?

With best regards, Pete

[Vince Becquiot]

If your end result is Digibeta, then your resolution will still be standard video (720 x 480).

If you zoom in at 200%, just double the resolution of standard video for your picture export. In square pixels that would translate to 1280 x 960. Or why not just work with the raw pictures at their original resolution ?

Unless it ends up slowing down your machine to a crawl…

Vince

[Mike Velte]

When Premiere scales images automatically, it creates a smaller version of each still in media cache that does not hold up well to motion.