size of photographs in Vegas
by Vegasboy
on
Oct 16, 2007 at 10:36:54 am
DV PAL is 720 x 576, non-square pixels. So the Vegas manual states that photographs need the size of 787 x 576 square pixels (if no zooming is required).
Richard Harrington suggests in his book 'Photoshop for Video 3rd edition page 375' that the size should be 768 x 576.
And finally Douglas Spotted eagle (well known at this forum) wrote in his 'Vegas 6 Editing Workshop page 132' that a size of 704 x 576 is required to fit the screen.
Re: size of photographs in Vegas by DSE/Spot on Oct 16, 2007 at 12:56:51 pm
787 x 576 is the correct value. The 704 was a typo (from 784 x 576) in the Vegas 5 book that (I thought) had been corrected in the Vegas 6 edition. I'm certain it is correct in the Vegas 8 edition. Apologies for any inconvenience. I'm with a different publisher now; hopefully that means a better tech edit.
Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST
Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor
Re: size of photographs in Vegas by BrianS on Oct 16, 2007 at 1:14:04 pm
I think the confusion may be because some of those numbers take into account the full raster and some just the 4:3 image. If you are scanning photos, or using digital images, I would always use an image somewhat larger than required, and use Vegas to crop it down. One reason is that you can see exactly what will show in action and title safe, and if the image is large enough, you can add some movement. Most editing applications will suffer in rendering time if the images are too large, so getting them close to size will let you achieve shorter renders.
Hope that helps.
Brian Scott
President
Image Design Productions, Inc.
Re: size of photographs in Vegas by DSE/Spot on Oct 16, 2007 at 1:20:06 pm
Brian, I'm confused as to what you're defining as different between "full raster" and "4:3 image." They can be the same. or not, depending on if the PAR is square or not. Some apps can't interpolate for non-square pixels in graphics. Vegas can, but it's the exception, not the rule.
Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST
Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor
Re: size of photographs in Vegas by rob mack on Oct 16, 2007 at 4:31:28 pm
Don't know about PAL, but in NTSC DV a frame of 720x480 is wider thans a 4:3 frame. 704x480 represents a 4:3 frame area.
NTSC TV signals always overshot the 4:3 area to allow for variation in TV side to side adjustment as well as rise and fall at the beginning and end of each line. Tube TVs had pretty slow response times, after all.
I'd assume that PAL is about the same.
For better or worse, Vegas assumes that still images are all "square pixels" and resamples them for your project. This is good for home users but can throw people who've always had to handle the conversion themselves when using other NLEs.
Re: size of photographs in Vegas by Jeff Weinberger on Oct 19, 2007 at 1:09:59 am
Vegasboy,
Another way to bring in a full screen non-zooming image is to create it using the frame size and pixel aspect ratio settings of your project. So for PAL 4:3 you could create a file 720 x 576 pixel aspect ratio 1.0926, or PAL 16:9 would have a pixel aspect ratio of 1.4568. A program such as Photoshop includes video templates and can quickly launch a new image with the correct settings. Photoshop can simulate device aspect ratio so that you can see how the finished project would appear on a playback device.
You can drop your non-square pixel image on the Vegas timeline, Vegas treats it as a square image and it does not fully fill the screen. But you can right-click the image, select Properties and uncheck the "Maintain Aspect Ratio" box. Your still image is treated like your video file and stretched to fill the screen.
Re: size of photographs in Vegas by vegasboy on Oct 19, 2007 at 8:02:12 pm
Thanks everybody for all the replies.
I know there are ways to stretch the photographs. But I'm still trying to understand the logic behind the different sizes given in literature.
787 x 576 is very logic because 720 x 1.0926 (the PAR value) is 786.672
However the value of 768 x 576 is also often found. Has this something to do with "full raster" and "ust the 4:3 image"? If yes, what does it mean?
Re: size of photographs in Vegas by rob mack on Oct 20, 2007 at 5:08:25 pm
Most likely "768" is a result of assuming that the video frame is actually, literally 4:3. It's not.
By convention, most older NLE's manuals calculated the corrected frame size as if the frame were really a 4:3 image. The math was wrong but it didn't usually matter because the programs didn't do the conversion for you. They were merely saying that you could use scans or camera images that were 768x576 and then before you imported it you'd have to manually convert it to your PAL frame size.
By convention, subsequent systems usually just copied the information from the older literature. Technically, the numbers are wrong, but if everyone does it wrong in exactly the same way it then you can still move media between programs easily.
For better or worse, Vegas does the conversion from square to non-square for you. Because it was written by audio guys, they actually did the math on the video sample rates and came up with different numbers. Vegas' math is right, but sometimes being right isn't as useful as going along with everyone else's wrong answer. So you might have a compositing program that insists that you need to use 768x576 for your output while Vegas might want something else. You might need to do some adjusting to get this output to work right in Vegas.
Vegas is a resampling editor which allows it to use all sorts of media on the same timeline. It was pretty revolutionary for the first several years of Vegas' life and Vegas still does it better than other systems but most other systems have closed the gap.
Vegas resamples everything to fit it to your project, including still images, which it assumes are using a 1:1 sample ratio (aka Square Pixels). The problem with this is that, to be consistant, Vegas also has to export stills that are corrected back to square pixels. This creates problems for other software.
The best thing that could happen would be for everyone to settle on a standardized PAR tag inside image files, because otherwise there's no way for software to know just how an image is supposed to be displayed.
Re: size of photographs in Vegas by Richard Harrington on Nov 13, 2007 at 1:30:04 am
Adobe Photoshop's recommendation for Square Pixel is 768 X 576... you then Resize to 720 X 576 using Adobe Photoshop (not Vegas). This is the right workflow for Square Pixels being forced into Nonsquare.
BUT... Last 3 versions of Photoshop support Non-square pixels.... Use those (MUCH EASIER)
Richard M. Harrington, PMP
Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork
