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when you’re zooming/panning on stills in Premiere Pro, does it matter what image format the stills were scanned and saved as???
I have several hundred stills that that were scanned at 600dpi in jpeg format. I know that 72dpi would be the norm for images in video, but I intend to zoom in at least 200% on many of the stills. So just to be on the safe side, I scanned them all at 600dpi.
In terms of panning and zooming on stills in Premiere Pro, does it matter that the images were scanned as jpegs rather than tiffs or png files? Will that cause problems in Premiere Pro CC for playback or does the image format not matter? If so, would it be wiser to convert all the jpegs to png or tiff files prior to importing into Premiere Pro CC? I understand that they would have to be tiffs or png files to have transparency for compositing purposes. But I only plan to do Ken Burns style moves on the stills, no compositing.
Thanks very much in advance.
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3 Replies
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JPEGs are perfectly fine. I set the quality slider to medium high.
You can set DPI to anything; it does not matter. DPI is a metric that affects print but not video. What matters is pixel dimensions. Depending on how much blow-up your move may do, you should do a scan that is about 2x your timeline resolution in the horizontal dimension. Excessive pixel size only bogs down the performance of your system.
Also worth knowing is that Moire patterns and jittery details on (especially) horizontal lines are the result of stills that are too sharp. In the past the solution was to apply some blur to the original still, re-import it and re-render the move, i.e. the blur had to be processed before the move or it wouldn’t work. However I was very pleased to discover the other day that in Premiere (at least the recent version) it works to apply a Gaussian blur filter to the “over-sharp” still clip and it will eliminate the jitter. Obviously, much easier.
Also related: I haven’t recently checked Premiere but Avid and Final Cut Pro can only deal with stills in RGB color Mode, not CMYK or grey scale.
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Thanks very much for your help and feedback Larry. So far I haven’t had any issues at all with jpegs, even as high as 4000 x 2160 resolution. And yes I did encounter exactly what you described at that resolution…moire patterns and sure enough yes it was easily solved by applying some gaussian blur. I’m very relieved to hear then that jpegs will be no problem. I also just discovered that Adobe Bridge does not allow me to store metadata for “gif” image files. Thank God I have very few gif images. I’ll be sure to convert them to png or tiff. I also see that in the latest version of Photoshop CC, when you save an image there is no “jpeg” option. A lot of other options though: PSD, tiff, png, BMP, even giff, but no jpeg option. Has jpeg been officially discontinued from photoshop as an image format? I thought gifs were an older format than jpegs.
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You’re welcome.
JPEG should definitely be a Save option, however it won’t show if a the format of the current image is not allowed by JPEG. Here’s a discussion:
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/5632/cant-save-psd-as-jpeg
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