Does Vegas 10 64bit Handle large JPGs without Crashing?

[Peter Riding]

Originally Posted by Kevin Janisch

Hi Pete, Thank you for the response. Can you elaborate a little on using PNGs on a transparent landscape background in the Pan Crop tool. Are you doing this in Photoshop and then bringing them into Vegas? Portrait jpg images have been a PITA as I've been going under pic properties in Vegas and doing a 90 degree rotate and then using the Pan Crop tool. Many thanks.

I am using Photoshop CS4 though no doubt there are lots of alternative ways. Typically I have several hundred JPEGs converted from RAW files from my two Canon 5DII's. A show may use a hundred or two hundred of these or just a handful depending on the the mix between stills and video for the final client product (and the video files are a mix of 5DII and Panasonic camcorder files).

Adobe Bridge, which is part of Photoshop, Dreamweaver etc, knows the correct orientation of every still image as do lots of other programs. I use Bridge to sort into two sets of images, one landscape and the other portrait.

A batch action I have written for Photoshop and run from Bridge resizes the landscape images to 3840px on the longest axis, adds a little sharpening, converts the embedded profile to sRGB from my working profile which is adobeRGB1998, and saves as a PNG. The reason for using 3840, to pick up on Jeff's point, is so that I can pan and zoom in to quite a large degree without suffering noticeable degradation. Its also important to me from a productivity point of view to be able to run the same action on hundreds of images and for the result to be usable 95% of the time without further editing.

An almost identical action for portrait images adds the step of creating a transparent backdrop of 3840px on the longest (landscape) axis and with the actual image in the middle. I do this by increasing the image's canvas size otherwise you can run into filename problems if you're trying to fully automate a batch action and don't want to have to rename files on a case by case basis.

I use two monitors, with Vegas in one and Bridge in the other. I drag PNG images from Bridge into the Vegas timeline. Its much easier to use Bridge for this than to import via the Vegas interface and you can catagorize and sort images in lots of ways in Bridge plus see any image full screen just by toggling the Space Bar.

I find that having the portrait images on a transparent landscape background makes life much easier in Event Pan / Crop mode especially if I want to get right up to the edge with a top level image whilst another image or video further down the stack of tracks is playing at the same time. I have various presets in Pan / Crop to position still images at various points e.g. I might use three portrait images , one left, one centre, one right, each on their own track, all transitioning in and out at slightly different times, and all underlayed by a further still or video track as a background. I tried to do this with portrait images without transparent landscape backgrounds but I was getting undesirable results, it was difficult to control the relationships between image size and position and how much of it could be seen before parts disappear ..... if you see what I mean :-)

I'm probably unusual in that many of my shows contain large quantities of stills so it makes sense for me to automate as much as possible. At the same time I like to retain control and I really dislike the programs or plugins that choose transitions and movement for you.

Pete

[Kevin Janisch]

Got it! Very slick indeed. Thanks a million for the workflow ideas!

[Dale Guthormsen]

Jeff, Mike,

Just looked over this post.

I just got several hundred family pics back to the 40's. I was agonizing about how to take on such a large Stills project and this Irfanview looks to save me a huge amount of time converting picture size!! I almost want to get at it now as apposed to just filing them away!!

You guys always have something up your sleeves!!!

[Jeff Harper]

I love Irfanview, and truly don't know what I'd do without it. I take 1000 wedding photos given to me by a photographer, batch resize the width to no greater than 1500pixels across (no need to set the heigth, at least how I do it, and in a few minutes they are all done.

I used to convert to png, but now I dont bother. They convert much faster keeping their native format, and the jpegs handle perfectly fine.

Photoshop stinks for batch processing, at least for my needs.