I am doing a short documentary and most of the photos I have were scanned in the tif format. Editing in Vegas 6 has been a painfully slow process which, after a quick search of the archives, I understand is a result of the tif format.

I understand that I can convert the tif photos to a png format which would be better. I wonder if someone could help me with the following questions:

1. Any recommended software for doing this? Will I be able to do a batch rather than one at a time?

2. Will there be much loss in resolution?

3. Since I am part way into this project, when the files are converted, will I need to manually replace the tif photos on the timeline with the png photos?

4. Is the png format the best approach for this? The tif scans are of black and white photos generally about 90 - 100 years old (in other words, the resolution is not great to begin with).

Thanks

Curt

You'll not lose resolution. If your images are larger than 2k in any direction, you're already losing out in the resample anyway.
PNG or TGA are the best formats, and you'll do better replacing your .tif with .png images.
There are many batch converters available to convert tif to png. I'm sure there is a free one out there somewhere. Replacing them is easy; just right click in the Project Media window and choose "replace" and all the effort you've put in so far, will be preserved.

...1. Any recommended software for doing this? Will I be able to do a batch rather than one at a time?...
Free - Irfanview
Lowcost - Paintshop Pro
The industry standard - Photoshop

It's been several years since I used Irfanview, but I think it has batch capabilities. Paintshop Pro does, as does Photoshop.

InfanView (http://irfanview.com/) does indeed have batch capability - and it's very quick too.
It's an excellent little program that I use almost daily for all sorts of photo-related issues.

Do not convert your pictures to PNG, it would be pointless. TIFF files are lossless, and typically uncompressed, so they should work faster than PNGs.

Emre, TIFF requires the use of Quicktime to work on the Vegas timeline. PNG doesn't. Therefore PNGs work much faster as they aren't going through the extra layer of Quicktime.

I agree, besides.. uncompressed does not typically = faster on any timeline. :)

I use an application that is WONDERFULL called Fastone Image Viewer that 100% free and has a batch converter built in. Frankly, I'm not 100% sure it'll do TIFF -> PNG but I would imagine that it will and even if it won't, TIFF -> HQ JPEG should suffice for you as well.

http://www.faststone.org/

Jon

Do not convert your pictures to PNG, it would be pointless. TIFF files are lossless, and typically uncompressed, so they should work faster than PNGs.

Emre, TIFF requires the use of Quicktime to work on the Vegas timeline. PNG doesn't. Therefore PNGs work much faster as they aren't going through the extra layer of Quicktime.
PNG is compressed, true, but it is not a lossy compression, it's a variation on run-length-encoding (RLE). Another nice thing about png is that it supports alpha channel transparency.

Definitely avoid tif in vegas!

Thanks to everyone who responded with great advice!

Converting to .png from .tif made a world of difference.

I used Irfanview. It is well worth the suggested donation: http://irfanview.com/

Also, I found some helpful tutorials for this software at: http://www.indeavors.com/resources/tutorials.htm .

Thanks again!