scanning old photos to use in a 2K documentary, PPP?

[Ann Bens]

DPI is meaningless in video.
Just look at the dimensions: height and width in pixels.
Make them the same as your project.

———————————————–
Adobe Certified Expert Premiere Pro CS6
Adobe Community Professional

[Paco Bech]

Thanks, I dont really understand, I heard for SD projects 150 ppp was fine, things like that.

Do I have to make the photos bigger to match a 16:9 project at 2K? with the same height and width in pixels than 2K?

cheers

[Chris Tompkins]

If it were me I would scan them in large.
Maybe 2500-3000 pixels on the large size and I would probably select 200dpi.

Chris

[Jeff Pulera]

The scanning dpi needed will depend on the size of the photo being scanned. As the other poster mentioned, video uses pixels and not “dpi”, so you need to figure out the math before scanning.

Your scanned image should have at LEAST enough pixels to fill the video frame, but if you want to add any pan/zoom in editing (Ken Burns style), then the image needs to be LARGER than the video frame size to allow extra pixels for blowing up image and retaining quality.

For 2k, the video frame is 2048 x 1080, so to fill the screen, the scanned image needs to be at least that size. Of course, if the photo is portrait style, then just look at the height and make that at least 1080 and you will have to fill in the sides with something else when editing.

So if you have an 8×10″ photo (landscape style), and you scan at 300 dpi, that results in a still of 3000×2400, which is more than enough to fill the 2k frame, and leaves some room to zoom/pan a bit as well.

If you use the same 300 dpi to scan a 4×6 (6×4 really), you end up with 1800×1200, falling a bit short of the needed size for your video. So the smaller the photo, the higher dpi you need when scanning. A wallet-size photo would need a very high dpi to get the needed pixels! Maybe 2400 dpi.

For images that don’t fill the screen (portrait-style pics), by default the edit software will just leave black on the sides. You’ll likely want to insert some type of background. A popular option is to use the same image, but stretch to fill the frame and add some blur. This provides a background with a matching color palette and it just looks more natural than other backgrounds.

If adding pan/zoom, sometimes fine details in the image will flicker when scaling. In that case, I add a SMALL amount of Gaussian Blur to a COPY of the still in Photoshop (don’t alter original scanned file). Just a tiny bit will do, maybe 0.1 or 0.2 and the blur is not even noticeable…except the zoom is suddenly silky-smooth!

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Paco Bech]

Thanks a lot , how do you calculate the resulting pixels? Size of the foto-DPI-Resulting Pixels

[Jeff Pulera]

To compute scanned image resolution, multiply inches x dpi.

So a 4-inch photo scanned at 300 dots per inch = 1200 pixels.

Once an image is scanned, please forget about dpi, it is no longer relevant, and you will be dealing with “resolution” as pixels.

You can do the reverse to estimate the dpi to scan a photo at to get the desired result.

If you need 2048 resolution on the long side of the photo to use the image in a 2K video, divide 2048 by inches to get the dpi needed. At 6″, 2048/6 = 341, so anything above 341 dpi will get you enough resolution to fill the frame, but remember that going bigger is ok as it allows room to animate the photo with zoom/pan movements also.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers