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janes97052219
Participant
May 13, 2017
Answered

Working with big and heavy images in Premiere Pro CC 2015

  • May 13, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 3224 views

Hello, I'm adding photos and illustrations to my 90 min documentary film. The aspect ratio I'm working with is 16x9 resolution 1920x1080. Many of the photos and illustrations I have to use are really big and heavy. For example, I have an image of 5634x4090 that weights 27.7 MB. That's huge. I was told that working with heavy files slow down your edit a lot, to the point that it can even crash the edit and give you many errors. In the edit I need to zoom in and out all the time besides adding a few effects to them, because of that I want the images to have really good resolution so they don't get distorted/pixelated.

How big and heavy should my photos and illustrations be approximately? What's the minimum and maximum size I should work with? In the future I'm going to screen the film in a movie theater so obviously I want the best resolution possible.

I appreciate your help!

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer R Neil Haugen

    For something that you know you're not going to pan & scan with ... "enlarge" ... you can do nicely with an image the size of your sequence's frame-size. So, for a 1080 sequence, a 1920x1080 setting would work fine. However, if you use double the frame-size, you can easily get it to "set to frame size" to see the whole image, or ... "zoom" a bit by pan & scan work.

    So most of the time, I make my graphics & stills double the frame-size for the sequence. Max.

    Neil

    2 replies

    R Neil Haugen
    R Neil HaugenCorrect answer
    Legend
    May 13, 2017

    For something that you know you're not going to pan & scan with ... "enlarge" ... you can do nicely with an image the size of your sequence's frame-size. So, for a 1080 sequence, a 1920x1080 setting would work fine. However, if you use double the frame-size, you can easily get it to "set to frame size" to see the whole image, or ... "zoom" a bit by pan & scan work.

    So most of the time, I make my graphics & stills double the frame-size for the sequence. Max.

    Neil

    Everyone's mileage always varies ...
    J
    janes97052219Author
    Participant
    May 15, 2017

    Thanks! So what you are saying is that the way you do it is by setting your images double the frame size and you have no problem when you zoom and pan?

    R Neil Haugen
    R Neil Haugen
    Legend
    May 15, 2017

    Double allows for quite a bit of zoom & pan work and keeps the total image size within a range that PrPro seems to accept without whining. I've been to 3x for a couple images. 4x ... gets iffy.

    Neil

    Everyone's mileage always varies ...
      Ann Bens
      Community Expert
      Ann BensCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      May 13, 2017

      If you dont want to pan and zoom around 1920x1080 would be ideal.

      Maximum depends on your computer.

      But most of the time Premiere will chock on large images.

      In other words you will have to experiment

      or try AE.

      J
      janes97052219Author
      Participant
      May 15, 2017

      Thank you for your answer! Yes, I was going to try AE but I have a lot of images like that and not much time, so I thought I could use a program to resize them all at the same time and someone recommended me to use Automator. So far the program hasn't fail me but I'm afraid that by adding more heavy images would affect it. So how big are your images aprox. when you do pan and zoom it in your computer? Just to have an idea...

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