Optimum size for photographs?

[June.wilson]

I am using Premiere Pro to build a slideshow for 840 photographs that I have added a line of white text with a black background to each photo. My photos are high resolution (20" x 13", 300 dpi) and it is resulting in a HUGE 86 GB .mp4 file when I export it - which takes hours to do. Obviously, downsizing my photos before importing them would help reduce the size, but what size do I reduce them to? When I reduced them to 1920 x 1080 p the pictures were too small. I want the final .mp4 file to have optimum resolution and the most efficient transfer size, I need to upload the finished .mp4 file to an outside supplier and I have to do it today. Help?!!

[Ann Bens]

If you need to export today in full resolution I am afraid you will have to sit out the many hours.

Not only do you need to downsize the photo's you also need to adjust the sequence setting and probably the text.

Best is to choose a standard sequence setting with a height and width like UDH or HD.

(btw premiere does not care about inches or dpi all it wants is height and width in pixels).

Guessing this project is about 6000x4000?

[Ishan Y]

Hey June,

Welcome to the community. If you don't have any changes to make in the file you have already exported, you can encode it again in ShutterEncoder with a smaller frame size. You can try the 4K resolution (3840x2160) if you want a larger frame size than 1920x1080. 

Thanks,

Ishan

[Richard van den Boogaard]

Or you can just run it through Media Encoder again and choose a 4K or 1080 resolution... no need for Shutter Encoder, right?

[Harold Silva]

Un detalle claro que tienes que tener en cuenta es que el video trabaja en resolución 72 y al usar fotos con resolución 300 no estás ganando calidad, solo haciendo que los procesos de exportación y procesado sean extremadamente lentos, más aun si usas el tamaño nativo de la foto que no coincide con los de video. (HD, 4k UHD por ejemplo)

Saludos

[Richard van den Boogaard]

You can approach this in various ways, but what you need to do first is determine what the required output resolution of the export is: where is the resulting video going to be displayed? On a regular HD screen or a 4K screen?

This will determine the size of your sequence in PPro. Choose the proper Preset or adjust the sequence settings of the one you have in your project. Next, you need to apply the required sizing settings in the Effects Controls Panel. In order to apply this to the other 839 photos, you can best create a preset of the motion settings by selecting the ones you have adjusted (e.g. scale/position/rotation) and save that out as a preset with a name of your choice. In the effects panel you can find the preset you have just created and drag that out towards all the other clips on the timeline.

If exporting still takes too long, consider doing a media preparation step in Photoshop or Lightroom first, where you adjust the size of the source files to the appropriate resolution of your sequence first (effectively making a copy of the source clips, but scaled down to either 1080p or 4k resolution). In Photoshop you can create a macro for this, while in Lightroom you can save out files under new size dimensions to a specific folder too.

Hope this helps.

[Ann Bens]

As I understand the question: OP only wants to downsize to reduce export time.

[Richard van den Boogaard]

Yes, but what is the point of creating a video at a resolution that you're never going to use, because the screen it is intended for only has a specific resolution?

Doing a slideshow on an external screen is sometimes much easier to achieve with PowerPoint than creating a video, btw. Unless, of course, you intent on doing transitions that PowerPoint cannot create...