Resizing images for Premiere Pro maintaining quailty

Steve gave a great post. Especially note his comment about using Set To Framesize! I cannot think of a situation that I'd want "scale to" for.

He's also right about using either high-Q jpegs or tiffs. I just use jpegs. I do recommend sizing them from Photoshop to no more than 3 times the long dimension of the sequences they'll be used on. So for a 1920x1080, the 'short' dimension should be three times the same dimension of the sequence, horizontal or verticle.

That seems to allow for quite a bit of 'zoom' work in the sequence at good quality.

Neil

.tif or .jpg? Tiff is an lossless format, jpeg is 'lossy'. So jpeg will introduce compression artifacts when saving an image from Photoshop. Will this matter? Probably not, if you set 'high' or 'maximum' quality in the jpeg export settings. The advantge of jpeg? significantly smaller images ... but if you save them at high or max quality they will still be very close to the originals. But if you absolutely want the highest possible quality use Tiff (or PNG, or Photoshop format) when saving out of Photoshop but accept the much larger file size.

To get the highest quality on your video exports from Premiere Pro all you need to do is ensure the resolution of your saved images matches or exceeds your video resolution (i.e. 1920x1080). *preferably 'exceeds' (see below)

But unless you are having actual Premiere Pro export issues due to large image sizes, generally I would suggest leaving the images as they and scaling them to fit the frame in Premiere Pro. Once any higher resolution image is exported from Premiere Pro it will now have the resolution of your sequence (i.e. 1920x1080).

If you are having specific issues with Premiere Pro or your computer handling high resolution or large files, then yes you can resize them in Photoshop and perhaps save as jpeg. If I use this workflow I still tend to resave images out of Photoshop to something a bit bigger than video resolution (something around 3000 pixels wide) this still gives some room to change the framing of the images in Premiere Pro without losing quality.

If for example you save one of your images to 1920 pixels wide from Photoshop but then decide to scale that image slightly in Premiere Pro - say you went to 120% in the Premiere Pro effects scale controls. Now you are scaling an image beyond it's actual resolution. If you had started with an image that was (say) 3000 pixels wide and scaled it to 120% in a 1920x1080 sequence - you have not lost any resolution because you had more to work with in the first place.

Importantly - if you plan to resize an image to be larger within your sequence use 'set to Frame size' NOT 'scale to frame size'

Hope this helps.