ot – digital stills camera?

[Edward Troxel]

I guess my first question would be, why differentiate between SLR and Digital? My digital *IS* an SLR (Nikon D70).

Edward Troxel

[Seatlanta]

Hi Leslie:
It’s certainly OK to hold me responsible for just about anything that goes wrong. That’s exactly what my wife does.

Anyway, if you’re referring to 35mm or other film cameras versus digital cameras, I’d say that digital is the way to go. Normal prints and slides will be digitized anyway, so why not skip that step?

I’m a watercolor artist, and I use a digital camera and scanner exclusively. In fact, I recently sold my Nikon 35mm and all of its lenses. They’ve been gathering dust for years.

I’ve also scanned 35mm slides with good results, but I think the secret is to make final corrections in Photoshop or a similar program.

I’ve found that Vegas 6.0 has some problems with very large (high-resolution) still images, especially jpegs. After many, many experiments, I found that if I keep my jpeg files below 1600 x 1200, Vegas does not hang or crash. In most cases, this is much more resolution than you’d need, but if you’re doing pans and zooms (Ken Burns effects) on the still image (as I do), you may need a high-res image.

I’m presently using a Canon Powershot S70, and I’m very pleased with it. The 7.1 megapixels are usually more than I need.

Good luck.

James (seatlanta)

[Chris Borjis]

I’d like to echo what james posted. Vegas works well with large images as long as they are under 1600 wide. I do find though, the closer they are to that number, the more likely you’ll have moire video artifacts occur that may require a further downrez in photoshop or some slight blurring to fix it.

The upside is of course that it works so fast. I just did a 289 picture movie show for a friend of mine and the whole thing took about 2 hours to do, where in the past it took me nearly a day.

But to answer your original question, I don’t think it is necessarily a digital SLR vs regular digital camera that is the issue. Make sure whatever you use comes with a nice lense as that is whats really going to matter as long as your equal to or above 5 megapixels.

[Terje A. bergesen]

Most digital cameras now have very good CCDs with a resolution that will meet most peoples needs. The difference between 7 megapixels and 8 megapixels is negligeable, even going to 10 or more is not going to be very noticeable unless you need to print large prints.

So, why a DSLR over a “regular” digital camera. Well, DSLRs have better optics. FAR better optics. This actually means significantly better images particularly in tricky (light etc) situations, which I guess you may find your self in occasionally.

I am a Canon person my self, and I shoot with a Canon DSLR, I have the A80 for snaps, and the family also has one or two other digital gadgets. The DSLR shoots pictures of FAR better quality in almost all situations.

You already have an investment in Nikon equipment, and Nikon makes terriffic DSLRs. With that in mind your best option is to go for a Nikon DSLR. Make sure your existing Nikon optics can be used on it, I am not sure how Nikon has handled that (being a Canon guy). I believe you will, over time, deeply regret going with Sony or equivalent.

In my, not too humble, opinion.

—
Terje A. Bergesen

[Leslie Wand]

thanks gents….

edward – i was thinking more of dedicated digital as opposed to slr with changeable lenes, etc.,

meanwhile, that opens up another avenue –

what’s the maxmimum size digital photo i can work with in v6?

when i had my studio we regularly worked with 3k to 4k images in after effects…..

thanks again,

leslie

[Edward Troxel]

Vegas can handle larger sized stills. The problem mentioned occurs when you have a LOT of larger stills it can eat up memory when rendering. If you render in smaller pieces it will work but, unless you pre-render, it could eat up memory until it died. This has been greatly improved in Vegas 6.0c but I can’t say 100% that it’s no longer a problem.

Generally speaking, though, you really don’t need that much resolution. Instead, you could resize them down to the size really needed. For example, if the image is 1200dpi, you might reduce it to 300dpi instead. Naturally on the ones you want to zoom in a long way you would need to keep resolution higher.

Edward Troxel

[Leslie Wand]

thanks for that edward….

i usually keep my scanning to a max of 800dpi – but i was wondering how the hi-res pics (3008 x 2000) directly off, say your nikon, did?

do you use straight as jpg or convert to png?

leslie

[Edward Troxel]

The images straight from the Nikon have worked fine for me. I leave them as the JPG the camera creates. I haven’t used a lot straight from the Nikon, though. Most of the time my images are scanned from photos. I never scan above 300dpi as I usually don’t have to zoom that deeply into the photos.

Edward Troxel