exporting from lightroom in 'highest resolution possible?'

Question

Heres a pickle:I completed stills for a film in Sunday. This is unusual in that the film editor is going to edit the stills into the final film.I'm working with the editor to ascertain exactly what format he wants these images in. The fim is being shot with HD video, and the editor keeps telling me he wants the images in the "absolute native Pixel dimensions of the RAW image".I shot raw images with a canon 5D Mark II, so technically, I believe this would be approximately 5,616 x 3,744 (of course, this would vary for each image, but this is the data I have read about the camera sensor).I shot about 1,000 images, so to deliver 1,000   images, output as TIFF's, at something like 4,000 pixels each seems insane to me, and unnecessary, but perhaps I'm wrong...... Can anyone provide input?Thanks a millionSan Fran Ellen

renambot · Accepted Answer

If the images are meant to be displayed fullscreen (like a still, in a timelapse, or in stop motion), you can give the person HD size frames (HD 1920x1080 or 2K size 2048x1536). To be safe, I would use TIFF 16bit depth with ZIP compression. Any editing tool should read that.

If the images are to be manipulated in editing (zoom,crop, ...), you might want to give 4K resolution (4096x2160).

The raw files (DNG, NEF, ...) probably won't be loaded into an editing software (FCP, premiere, avid, ...).

Not knowing the details, a safe bet could be 2K TIFFs.

Luc

Jao vdL · Answer

output as TIFF's, at something like 4,000 pixels each seems insane to me, and unnecessary, but perhaps I'm wrong...... Can anyone provide input?

You are absolutely right of course. It is insane. There are a lot of myths in these fields that a lot of people believe in despite evidence of the contrary. HDTV is really low resolution with respect to a file produced by a 24 MP camera. The highest res that is common in high def (1080p) is only 2MP resolution!!! Because sometimes you just got to give these folks what they want, you should probably just follow Lee's advise and don't resize on export. This gives you "native" pixel size but of course is complete overkill. Jpeg at quality >90 is visually indistinguishable from tiffs so if you can get them to accept that that is your best compromise between quality and disk space requirements. Even quality 80 will not be visible. A typical 24 MP jpeg at quality 90 should be around 5-10 megs depending on the subject, so your 1000 images end up max around 10 gigs.

P.S. The very best quality for the final product is obtained in a way that most of these folks will think is crazy but actually works. What you do is crop your images to landscape 16:9 (the HDTV standard), and export to precisely 1920x1080 pixels in the sRGB space and use standard sharpening for display in the export. Jpeg at quality >90 is just fine. If this gets transferred to the HD product without panning/zooming/scaling/cropping, you end up with the very best quality you can get and you'll only use 1 MB per image or so. However, if they intend to pan and zoom you're better off increasing the export resolution to at least 2k pixels vertical, or just giving them full resolution. Note that a landscape image of 2k pixels vertical has an area resolution 4x higher than the HDTV standard!

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