photo res for HD doco?

[Ian Callaghan]

Hi team

As a novice i am making a little doc about the sexual abuse of children in Nicaragua for a not for profit project. I have a photographer who has years worth of images of children that i think would be willing to share some of these.

My question, maybe with an obvious answer (1080) is what resolution is recommended for HD film? i guess knowing what the lowest recommended size would be would help. my understanding is that he has a lot of photos gathered over time with varying resolutions.

any other advice pertaining to images in HD film would be welcome with open arms.

a thanks to anyone that can spare their time,

cheers

Ian

[Vishal Jadhav]

Ian,

The 1920x 1080 standard is fine however when we use stills in a video we always like to have it with some effects like zoom in , pan etc. For these type of effects i guess a 4 megapixel image at the lower end would be good.
However the bigger picture you get more things you can do with it may be a rule to be remembered.

Just my thought.

best regards
vishal

[Ian Callaghan]

great, thanks vishal.

the kind of advice i was looking for.

thank you for taking the time to respond.

much appreciated.

[Mike Watson]

I find that when amateurs start messing with files, it's bad for me in the end. I ask for "native resolution", meaning, please don't mess with it, just send it over and I will play with it. In my experience, this stops people from taking their 320x240 image into MS Paint and transforming it into a 4 megapixel image.

I am generally looking for 1920x1080 or better, but for a decent photo I wouldn't hesitate to go in the 1MP ballpark. For a really great photo, resolution means little to me - I'd rather have the photo nomatter the size.

[Jonathan Levin]

Ian,

In a perfect world, I try to work with as high res files as someone can provide me, if their capture equipment is decent. I work in Final Cut, and I generally work with images that are 3600 pxl. wide. or a tiff/Photoshop file that is around 26MB. Yes these are big, but this gives you the freedom to do motion control or "Ken Burns" style zooms and pans.

I'd also like to point out that I've worked with images as small as a couple of MBs and had pretty good luck resizing them up in Photoshop. Just not to big. I've even used video shot from older cellphones in my videos.

The trick to this is to not feel like you have to fill the entire video frame with the image. Keep it smaller in the frame and use another image, blurred or some other non distracting effect, and use that image as the background. Then darken that background image. Of coarse that background image should fill your frame.

You'll see this effect on a lot of news type shows where their source material was not great to begin with so they keep the main image smaller so that it does not look really horrible.

[Ronan Fournier]

Also remember to convert the pictures to 72dpi. Final Cut doesn't appreciate 300dpi pictures which may create memory bugs.

[Sanjin Svajger]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Levin

Of coarse that background image should fill your frame.

This is important. Don't get tempted to leave letterboxes at the sides. This is somewhat a television standard for working with photos. Except maybe news - where info. trumps production techniques.