Import still image without resizing

[martiinvie]

Hi,

 

I have a still image 1280px wide and about 3600px high. I want to scroll this image from bottom to top using the motion effect. But when I import the image VideoPad resizes it to fit the height of the screen. I cannot even re-resize it inside VideoPad to fit the width of the screen because the maximum scale is 300%. Am I missing something? How can I import the image file without it being resized to to fit the screen height?

 

I have VideoPad Professional v. 3.0.0 for Windows.

 

Thanks

 

Martin

[Nationalsolo]

Hi

 

The first thing to note is that VP will fit your image to the frame, no matter what its size in pixels and aspect ratio. If it is tall then it will fill the frame top to bottom leaving blanks to each side. If it is wide it will fit it to the width if the frame and leave blanks at the top and bottom.

 

Obviously to fit these images to the frame you will need to use the crop effect.

For an upwards pan...

Select your sequence line clip (your image) and the Crop effect. forcing it to a 16:9 aspect ratio by clicking the small box marked so.

Reduce the crop rectangle to the area you want (in a tall image you would bring in the sides to match your image width. and click the "Zoom to cropped region" box.

Drag the rectangle to the area that you want to start your pan from. e.g The bottom of your image.

Now check the efffects preview red cursor line is at the start of the clip and click one of the green crosses. This will set the start frame for your pan effect.

Slide the red effects cursor bar to the end of the clip and drag your crop rectangle up to the top of the frame.

Click the Apply button.

Once the frames have been generated close the effects window and play the clip.

You should now see that it fills the screen and pans up the image.

 

By altering your start and stop positions for the selected crop area you have movement in any direction.

 

Nat

[martiinvie]

Hi,

thanks for answering quickly. But what happens when you shrink an image and then blow it up again?

It gets horribly pixellated. I'm sorry, but this method is useless in this case, as the image is very tall and thus gets reduced to about 20% of its original size when imported.

Martin

[Nationalsolo]

Hi

 

In some ways I can see what you mean. I have just loaded a vertical tif image 1877 x 2616 pixels (4megs) and zoomed in with a 16:9 frame as I outlined in my post above. The exported video certainly becomes very pixelated at a certain point, much more so than zooming into the original tif image under Windows.

But a zoom is not a pan or scroll which is the effect that you suggested you wanted and doesn't enlarge the image. My test was done with the default "Quality" Rate factor values for the video compressor I am using.The pixelation you are seeing even with the image not enlarged is most probably due to this "Quality" setting of the Video Compressor being left at the default value of 23. This is set to give the best output definition commensurate with a reasonable rendering speed of the outputed video.

 

Proceed as follows...

 

Set up your crop effect screen as outlined above to pan up your image.

When you export...

 

Set the Preset to "Custom"

File format ".avi"

Set Resolution to 1920 x 1080 (You Tube 1080p) i.e. HD 16:9

Frame rate: 25(TV PAL) or 29.97(TV NTSC) depending on your location.

Now click the Encoder options button.

 

Set Video compressor to H264 (Native)

Set Sound compressor to MP3 (Native)

Set Sound format to 44100 Hz 320 kbs , Stereo

 

Now click the "Compressin Settings" button. (Higher up)

Slide the Quality slider to the left to show a value of 1 (High Quality)

 

Click OK

Click OK

Click Create.

 

With the Quality setting set to 1 the image in the resulting video will be as good as you are going to get but rendering may take longer than with the default setting of 23..

 

Nat

[martiinvie]

Hi Nat,

 

thanks for taking the trouble, but I fear I must contradict. All the other still images I am using look good. And cropping and then filling the screen is obviously the same as zooming in.

 

I hope the programmers are reading this. Automatically resizing an imported image is not a good idea. The decision should be left to the user.

 

In case someone wants to know what I did in the end: I split the original image into pieces of 16:9 ratio, put the top part on track1 and the second part on track 2, then scroll them both: The top part from Y=0 to Y=-100 and the bottom part from Y=100 to Y=0. When the the top part has left the picture and the second part fills it, I repeat the process with the second and the third part and so on. It's tricky, because you have to be very exact.

[Nationalsolo]

Hi

 

Well, that does seem to be work around for your particular problem and, as you say tricky to get just right. Glad it worked.

 

I am a bit surprised however, that even though VP "resizes" the image to fit the 16:9 screen there is insufficient resolution for this particular image to not look OK when you crop to 16:9 (the pan up shouldn't affect the resolution.) The image I tested looked quite OK when cropped and panned. (Zooming in did go blocky as I mentioned although the output video was fine with the rendering quality set to 1)

Bearing in mind that you can enlarge an image to any particular size (yours was 1280 x 2600) and it can look good at this level except that it might be on the verge of looking blocky if the original was not of high resolution. What made this image different from the others which you say seemed OK? Was it a smaller image made larger for a start?

 

Another point is VP, in the interests of speed in real time rendering creates smaller images from the original and these are used in the preview video, and are what you see during editing. I am pretty sure that the final rendering is done on the original image using the data obtained during editing.

The test I did with a full zoom and high quality encoding produced an excellent output film with no huge difference between the zoom shown in the film and a zoom into the image under Windows. At the end point both images looked similar.

 

I also thought I would compare the original tiff image with a VP snapshot of the "reduced" fitted image. However as the output from this is a .png, I wasn't surprised to notice the reduced resolution in the snapshot.

 

Nat

 

Nat