Image size

[Barry Beckham]

Some of you may know that I recently upgraded to a large flat screen monitor running 1920*1200 pixels. My old monitor (1280*1024) was on its last legs and I decided to dump it before we left the UK for Australia.

I have already said that since upgrading to this new monitor and seeing how impressive the slide shows look at a larger size, I regret not seeing the light a bit sooner by making some of my later shows at a higher resolution than 1280*1024. Of course that is easy to say with hindsight, but there have been a number of changes within PTE and the power of our computers for AV workers to perhaps take stock of what they are currently doing. I think we are at the point where current wisdom on image size can be questioned.

In fact someone on the PTE forum did say to me once that it was a shame that my Balloon show he had just viewed was not larger. I think my reply at the time was that size doesn't add appeal, impact, or quality to a slide show. Now, looking back, I think he had more of a point then I appreciated at the time. All things being equal a larger show is more impressive and does have more impact.

So, I wonder if this test slide show is of interest to anyone. A short while ago I gave PSG another try, but I still cannot get good enough animations at 1024*768 to create demos and I abandoned it, because of that lack of power.

Today I have put a demo slide show together with images directly from my camera. I have just taken a slight crop from the top/bottom to retain a 16:10 format to fill my PC screen. The images sizes used in this demo are from a 22 million pixel Digital SLR and the images I used are 6144* 2840 pixels. I used slow transitions to see if PTE coped or there was any evidence of flicker on the transitions, there was none. I animated 2 of the images and apart from a small amount of the moiré effect that I think the anti shimmer filter has stopped, the animation is also smooth as silk.

The animations I use are generally slow and delicate and I am sure that is having a positive effect effect, but the slide show ran perfectly on my main PC which has the following spec:-

Windows Vista

Intel Quad Core 2.66 GHz

4 Gig of Ram

Nvidia Gforce 8600GT

Dell monitor 1920*1200

I then ran the show on my older PC and that too ran the slide show perfectly:-

Windows XP

Pentium 4 3.4 GHz

2 Gig of Ram

Radeon X1300

IIyama 1024*768

I also had the clubs laptop at home and that played the show perfectly too:-

ITC Laptop

Processor 2GHz

1 Gig of Ram

Nvidia Gforce Go 6800

1024*768

Does this not indicate that those currently running a 1024*768 or 1280*1024 pixel screen may have the ability to increase the size of the shows they are making now? Not necessarily to 6144*3840, but larger than you currently think is the standard or norm. This could build in an option for people to see their current slide shows filling another much larger monitor, which they may purchase in the future, even though they may not be ready to upgrade now.

I have made this point before, but, I have never tried images quite this large before and I don't see any of my PC's as state of the art. The youngest of them being almost 2 years old.

It might be useful for PTE users, particularly those who feel their PC is low power or not quite up to the job, to see just what it can do. You might be surprised. Our club laptop can't be described as anything but average and it runs this show fine.

It is going to depend on the style of your show, those who like a lot of fast animations are not going to achieve them with these sized images, but if your AV style is similar to mine, perhaps this idea is worth some thought. What I suggested before was to make a high resolution show, then use the save to zip option to make any size of format you want from that high resolution original.

The demo is 33.4 meg and can be found here

http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/slideshow/trials/6144_3840.zip

Eric. While this demo is over your 25 MB limit, why not give it a try and see how your PC handles it? You never know

[fh1805]

G'day Barry,

Lovely sequence. I noticed some definite moire on the koala's fur and a slight jump during the zoom of that image but probably not enough to be a worry to a general audience. A camera club audience probably would pick up on it, being the perfectionists that they are. My system's spec is in the attached file (courtesy of nobeefstu's PC Reporter utility).

I was one of the participants in your previous discussion on this subject. As a result of that I am, for this year, building all my new sequences at 1920x1080 (making them HD Ready). My reasoning is that, by the time I might need to replace my digital projector, the world will have gone past HD Ready and will be HD There and the only projectors available will be HD format.

I have not noticed any obvious image degradation when running a 1920x1080 sequence through a 1024x768 projector. I have seen very obvious image degradation when running a 1024x768 FullScreen sequence through a 1920x1080 projector at a club I was visiting. It was so obvious that I never want to see any of my shows projected in that "up-sized" manner again.

Later today I will check your sequence out on my two laptops and will come back and post the results.

regards,

Peter

PC_SF Report.txt

[davegee]

Hi Barry,

...and welcome to the wonderful world of HD slide shows.

Your show runs perfectly on my laptop's 1280x800 monitor. I took particular notice of the Koala after having read Peter's post and there was no detectble Moire on two seperate passes. I will edit this post to include results on my 1920x1200 monitor.

It does, indeed, prove that today's systems are capable of running shows with images straight out of the camera.

Laptop details:

Intel Core Duo T8100 2.1Ghz

4Gb Memory

nVidia 8400GT

Vista

DaveG

Edited to add that on my desktop m/c with attached 1920x1200 monitor the result is exactly the same.

There was no moire or jumping on the Koala and the appearance of the animal's fur should be proof enough to anyone of the value of using all of the resolution available from your DSLR wherever possible.

[Barry Beckham]

Thanks Guys

I think the point I am trying to make is that (he takes a gulp and waits for the flack) the days of 1024*768 are over and its time we moved on a bit.

There doesn't seem to be a great deal of point in me creating shows at 6144*3840, which is more than 3 times larger than my PC screen. I don't think I will be using a screen three times the size of this one in the near future . However, it does demonstrate, I believe, that many who are slogging on with 1024*768 probably have the scope to re-adjust their thinking.

What we are seeing with these large files can't be all down to PC power. Igor must have contributed a lot to the engine room of PTE. Whatever he is doing, he is doing it right.

I have been showing 1280*1024 pixel shows on my 1024*768 PC projector for years at demos and they play fine. All I did was change the resolution of the PC while I played the 1280*1024 show and changed it back to continue my demo. I suggested PTE forum members might like to do that once, but you would think I had just asked them to join me in mass suicide.

Yes, my standard size show is now 1920*1200 and I am not having any difficulties at all with what I do. The shows play great on the Dell flat screen and project perfectly through my 1024*768 PC projector. If I need a DVBD, that size is great for that too.

It wasn't many years ago when a show greater than 1024*768 would grind to a stop on all but the latest PC, now look what we can handle. Images at 6144*3840 and animated too. whoda thought

[fh1805]

I'm back. I've just tried the sequence on my Acer laptop (2 years old) and no trace of moire on the Koala and no jump during the zoom. The spec file for the Acer is attached.

I've tried to fire up the old Fujitsu Siemens laptop (10 years old) and it wont have it. I'll have to dig a bit deeper on that. If I can resurrect it I'll run the show and come back again.

regards,

Peter

PC_SF Report.txt

[jfa]

Barry,

This is something I have been debating in my mind for sometime now and I think your AV and points made here have convinced me.

All my shows from now on will be made as a HD master and then if needed resized.

Great show, ran perfectly on both of my PCs with only a little moire on the koala's fur.

Win Xp Pro SP3+

CPU Intel P4 2.27 GHz 8 kilobyte primary memory cache,

512 kilobyte secondary memory cache.

2G Installed Memory.

Nvidia GeForce FX5700 256 VRAM

VideoMode 1280 by 960 pixels, 75 Hertz.

DirectX 9.0c

Laptop Fujitsu Life-book

Win Xp Pro SP2+

CPU Intel Pentium M 1.73 GHz 64 kilobyte primary memory cache,

2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache.

512 Megabytes Installed Memory.

ATI Mobility Radeon X300 64 VRAM

VideoMode 1280 by 800 pixels, 60 Hertz.

DirectX 9.0c

[Ken Cox]

Barry,

This is something I have been debating in my mind for sometime now and I think your AV and points made here have convinced me.

All my shows from now on will be made as a HD master and then if needed resized.

Great show, ran perfectly on both of my PCs with only a little moire on the koala's fur.

Win Xp Pro SP3+

CPU Intel P4 2.27 GHz 8 kilobyte primary memory cache,

512 kilobyte secondary memory cache.

2G Installed Memory.

Nvidia GeForce FX5700 256 VRAM

VideoMode 1280 by 960 pixels, 75 Hertz.

DirectX 9.0c

Laptop Fujitsu Life-book

Win Xp Pro SP2+

CPU Intel Pentium M 1.73 GHz 64 kilobyte primary memory cache,

2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache.

512 Megabytes Installed Memory.

ATI Mobility Radeon X300 64 VRAM

VideoMode 1280 by 800 pixels, 60 Hertz.

DirectX 9.0c

WELCOME TO THE1920/1080 uisers gang, which a few of us have been advocating [ including Igor] for quite some time

-- you will soon see that biggers is better

- when saving your resize files save at 80% to 100% quality - you wont regret it

-- if need be buy a bigger hd

Barry your show ran perfect on my 4:3 1024/768 19" lcd monitor with the expected bands top amd bottom, when fed to my 37" lcd tv via the svhs output of my ATI card, border all around which is a normal condition using svhs -- no pixelation when viewed at 1 foot

ken

[RayC]

Great news Barry your show played perfect on my laptop so checked a few Photos, largest size in pixels my camera takes

is 3888x2592 so cropped to 3840x2400 my monitor is 16x10 and was very pleased with the results.

Thanks a lot Ray

[morturn]

Great demo Barry.

The short answer is yes, you should make it fill the screen, the bigger the better. My logic behind this is based on thing I know about memory and the way we associate yourself with an image.

Psychologists and artists know all about this, and use it to their advantage. If you have a bright colourful image, no border, you invite the viewer to step into the image and associate themselves with it. It works great on landscapes.

If you place a wide black border around an image, it causes your mind to disassociate from it, make the images black and white, and they disassociate from it even more.

It may be worth asking the question, do people fully understand resolution? I suspect not in a few cases, but people are afraid to say so. It may be worthwhile asking people to contribute to a sticky, explaining resolution in simple terms, as even when I see 1024x762, and 3840x2400 etc etc makes my head spin, it’s almost impossible to visualize.

[JEB]

Hi,

Just tried it on my low spec Compaq nx6125, ATI Radion 128 MB, 1536 RAM, 1024x768 and worked perfectly, even the zoom on the self portrait was perfect!!

Regards

John

[Barry Beckham]

I thought that huge show would surprise people in how their PC handled it, and so far that seems to be the case. I suppose I came a bit later than some to a larger resolution screen. I had a very old 21 in in the UK and hung onto that even though it has well passed its sell by date. I was reluctant to buy something new that would then have to spend 3-4 months in a container on the high seas travelling to Australia. Had I not done that I may have made the change 2 years ago and in some respects I wish I had.

A soon as we arrived in Australia I bought the monitor before a house and car, or much else for that matter. Now that probably says a lot about me , but I soon picked up on the improved size and PTE's ability to handle a bigger size. Why is it then that there is this clinging to 1024*768 as though it is the holy grail?

I suppose it is a human thing that if something works, why keep looking for what is better, but modern technology moves so fast that we can often not appreciate it. When I started doing talks in Camera Clubs in the early days, 10-12 years ago or more I always had those hecklers in the audience who kept saying digital was not as good as film etc etc etc.

I contacted a lab and to cut a long story short they agreed to print me a large image free of charge, all I had to accept was their logo on the mount. I thought I might me lucky and get an A3, at that time not many A4 printers were around. When I got the image back they had printed it 30*20

Two things happened, firstly I was amazed at the quality as I had no idea I had that quality locked in my then 15 in monitor and files. That print did a lot for me in those early days, but better than that, it left the hecklers speachless. To see them sitting in the audience holding an image so big it was spread over the person sitting next to them, while looking for the pixels they couldn't find.....priceless.

To some degree I have been equally amazed at how these huge files in a slide show appear to be working and to all those still clinging to 1024. Ask yourself why?

[dpeterso]

Today I have put a demo slide show together with images directly from my camera. I have just taken a slight crop from the top/bottom to retain a 16:10 format to fill my PC screen. The images sizes used in this demo are from a 22 million pixel Digital SLR and the images I used are 6144* 2840 pixels.

[Ken Cox]

Today I have put a demo slide show together with images directly from my camera. I have just taken a slight crop from the top/bottom to retain a 16:10 format to fill my PC screen. The images sizes used in this demo are from a 22 million pixel Digital SLR and the images I used are 6144* 2840 pixels.

Barry -

You've demonstrated a good point. It was Jeff Lunt that first suggested to me that it's wise to size your images for the world of wide screens and HDTV (1920 x 1080). I sort of dismissed it that was, until I bought my 23" (1920 x 1080) monitor. Since then I have been going back through my slideshows and converting to the HD format. Believe me, you better have a lot of time on your hands to embark on this conversion journey. However. it is well worth it once done.

Someone in an earlier post today raised a question in my mind regarding "image quality". Ovbviously, as you increase the image quality when saving the picture in Photoshop, the size of the file increases. On my images cropped to 1920 x 1080, I save at a level 5 (Medium)yielding an image size of 172K (this will depend on the image of course). When saved at the maximun image quality of 12, it produces an image size of 491K. So, the question is: the bigger the image file size is, the more it will tax one's computer. Quality 5 works for me, but are there any recommendations on image quality settings? I don't want to learn after I buy my big HDTV that I should have been saving my pictures with the image quality set to the max.

Regards,

Dave

[davegee]

Dave,

I wrote a long piece only to find that because of a forum error I couldn't post and couldn't copy!!

I am not going to do it all again but I'll precis it:

Don't rely on others experiences.

Do a test using "Save for the web" gradually decreasing quality and when you see a patch of clear blue sky in an image start to pixellate you know (roughly) the limits of your camera's images at a given resolution. Do the check at "ACTUAL PIXELS"!

I use quality 10 but I could probably use between 6 and 8.

10 gives me a margin of error and I don't have to keep checking for pixellation.

Barry can probably go further because of the size of his sensor - I did some tests in conversation with him some time ago and found that a 23M camera will allow greater compression than a 12M camera of the same make (NIKON) after resizing both to 1920x1080.

1920x1080 file sizes are:

Quality 10= 1MB

Quality 8= 660K

Quality 6= 460K

That's with MY camera - yours could be different.

DaveG

[Guest Yachtsman1]

This all sounds very well and hunky dory, but what about people using 300+images in shows then trying to burn to a DVD, do the maths, they won't fit. I think Blue Ray has a larger capacity than a standard DVD, but that means even more expense. Some of us don't have bottomless money pits.

Yachtsman1

[dpeterso]

This all sounds very well and hunky dory, but what about people using 300+images in shows then trying to burn to a DVD, do the maths, they won't fit. I think Blue Ray has a larger capacity than a standard DVD, but that means even more expense. Some of us don't have bottomless money pits.

Yachtsman1

Eric, you read my mind. I did some experimenting with "Quality of Image" setting in Photoshop. Here is what I learned:

Camera is a Canon 40D, 3888 x 2572 resolution set on "FINE".

I took a picture into Photoshop and cropped to 1920 x 1080

Saved at a 5 = 94 KB size

Saved at an 8 = 174 KB size

Saved at a 12 = 921 KB size

I can see the difference in the quality (sharpness) between a 5 and the 8 and 12, even viewing at "Actual Pixels" at 100%, It really shows up at 200%.

This tells me that what Ken said rings true, that the higher quality setting really shows up on a HDTV.

Now to Eric's concern. Size. If I have a 75 slide slideshow with pictures set at a 5 (94KB each), then if I take the same show with pictures saved at a 12 (921 KB each), doesn't this mean a 979% increase in size? (With all other things in the show being proportional)

It has me wondering, and learning too.

Dave

[fh1805]

Dave,

You cannot just do a straight "proportional" increase on your EXE file size. Your music files are going to take the same space irrespective of the size of your images.

If your music is MP3 then you are probably looking at about 1MB per minute. If the music is WAV raise that to 10MB per minute.

So, to do your up-scaling you must first calculate the music element and subtract it from the file size - and then up-scale what is left.

regards,

Peter

[Barry Beckham]

Dave

You will always recieve different opinions on saving images and jpeg compression. I have always saved at level 6 as that seems to me a nice balance between size and quality, but don't forget that creating images at HD size still throws away millions of pixels from most images these days. In that case a slight touch of unsharp mask may be called for to give back a little of crispness lost. Care needs to be taken if you intend to animate the image as too much sharpness can increase the Moire effect. Of course things are not always equal and quality doesn't just come from the pixel count, although that helps.

I have been saving images at level 6 for years in slide shows and quality has never been an issue with me, but to be sure, why not make your next a slide show and use jpeg quality 12 then see how the runs. If it works well, then great, if it creates any issues all you need to do is save the images again and change the save quality. If you are a Photoshop user you can always use the automatic Image Processor to do this automatically for you, but perhaps its best to always create these derivitives on a copy of your slide show.

If we make our shows at higher resolutions and save them at level 12 we could think of that slide show like we do raw files. From that one high resolution show we can make any number of derivitives quicky and easily, even DVD's now or in the future as technology changes.

Large Shows

Well, I think they need to be avoided like the plague, but that is just my view. I have been asked many times if PTE can cope with many different pieces of music and 300+ slides and I always say yes it can, but your audience won't. If your making a show that looks like it may be a large one, then in my view it needs splitting into appropriate sections so that the viewer has a choice of which part to watch and when. If I put 300+ of my best images together from the last 20 years, could you realistically sit down and watch the lot and enjoy it one go, maybe sitting there for 50 minutes or more. I would suggest that most people would be reaching for the escape key before you are a quarter of the way in.

We can take a few liberties with images for a slide show that we would never take with images destined for printing or storage for possible printing. Adding increased sharpness is probably the best example. Animation aside we can apply more sharpness than we would for hi-res prints, if we need to.

The reasons are that our images for a slide show are never going to be printed, they certainly will never be enlarged and they are only on screen (generally) for a few seconds at most. So images that have that instant impact an appeal often work well in a slide show even though you may not be able to put the image on the wall and live with it for a year or two.

Having said all that, if your large show will not fit on a DVD, then just re-save the images and make a slight compromise on what quality/size you would like to save at, as opposed to what you can realistically achieve.

[dpeterso]

Dave

You will always recieve different opinions on saving images and jpeg compression. I have always saved at level 6 as that seems to me a nice balance between size and quality, but don't forget that creating images at HD size still throws away millions of pixels from most images these days.

Good input Barry -

I did some further testing to assess the impact on a slideshow’s size when using JPEGS saved at “5” (medium quality) as opposed to a “12” (maximum quality).

The original image was shot with a 10-megapixel camera (3888 x 2592), and comes out as a 2258 KB JPEG.

I cropped this 2258 KB image to 1920 x 1080 and saved with the following quality levels:

5 (medium quality) = 105 KB image

12 (maximum quality = 1223 KB image

I then created four slideshows, two with music (4988 KB MP3 song), and two without music.

All four slideshows had the image copied 50 times using a 7 second time with a 3 second fade in/out transition. In other words, I created four 7 x 50 = 350 minute slideshows.

Here are the slideshow sizes:

50 slides saved at “5” with 4988 KB music = 5374 KB

50 slides saved at “5” without music = 386 KB

50 slides saved at “12” with 4988 KB music = 6493 KB

50 slides saved at “12” without music = 1504 KB

These findings really surprised me. Here are my observations:

The music, not the slides are what make the slideshows so large.

The music had no bearing on the size of the show other than its own 4988 KB size.

I have no idea how one can put 50 slides, each at 105 KB in size into a slideshow and come up with a show (without music) at 386 KB. (I would have thought it would be 50 x 105 = 5250 KB). It must be some of that PTE magic!

This experiment doesn’t address the image quality issues however. I don’t have an HDTV, so I can’t experiment and see for myself. However, noticing a difference in image quality between a 5 and a 12, tells me that when one blows it up further, like on a 60” HDTV, the proof will be self-evident. I’m going to begin saving at image quality level of 12.

Dave

[Guest Yachtsman1]

This all sounds very well and hunky dory, but what about people using 300+images in shows then trying to burn to a DVD, do the maths, they won't fit. I think Blue Ray has a larger capacity than a standard DVD, but that means even more expense. Some of us don't have bottomless money pits.

Yachtsman1

Since posting this I've done some checking and calculations. The current DVD blanks I use are supposed to hold between 4.2 & 4.7 GB, I now know Blu Ray discs hold around 24GB.

The current charity DVD I am working on is scheduled to run for 1 hour, currently I have 541 pictures which equates to 50min 28secs seconds with the sldes set at between 4 & 8 seconds. This amounts to 130mb of pictures, sized at 1024x768, level 5 in Elements 6. So I estimate I need around another 87 pictures to fill the hour say 20.8mb giving a total volume of say 150mb. The one hour sound track has the music element compiled and this equates to a 55.3mb MP3 file, it stll needs the voice over adding, which is probably 20 of the 60 minute run time. The music continues through the voice over so I believe I would probably be adding another 22mb to the sound track making a total of say 78mb of sound track. I'm not sure I have calculated this correctly, but I'm sure someone will check the figures.

Now using the resolution suggested by others, I re-sized one of the shows raw images which was 23mb out of the camera & when added to Elements 6, showed a resolution of 4752x3168. I re-sized this to 1920x1280 set at the previous level 5, this gave me an image file size of 365kb as opposed to my original 117kb.

Multiplying that by my estimated slide total of 628 gives a total picture file size of 229220kb which I believe is 229.2mb, add the new sound track this gives a total to be burned to a DVD of 307mb. It's late now and my brain is starting to protest. I know previously, maybe Conflow stated the maximum size of show that could be burned to a DVD using PTE's DVD system. I'm almost certain at 307mb, it can't be done. Taking the picture quality to say size 9 or 10 would obviously exacerbate the problem.

To sum up, all the wedding DVD producers, including those who produce shows similar to mine would be in deep s**t by adopting what has been suggested. Obviously Blu Ray would get you over the problem, but I do hear Blu Ray may not be universally adopted as a more efficient system is about to be launched.

I rest my case, bed calls.

Yachtsman1

PS the picture I re-sized is below.

[Barry Beckham]

Eric

Two things.

1. The suggestion wasn't seriously suggested for those of you who want to use 620 images in one slide show, lasting an hour. I would suggest that this isn't what the average PTE users does and whatever suggestion you make in life there will always be extremes where it doesn't apply.

2. Don't do it if you think its a daft idea, It's not compulsory, just something to consider.

However, here is a question for those more technically minded than me. Let me put this statement forward and see if I have this right, I am not sure to be honest, because the last DVD I made was such good quality on the 60 in plasma that I wondered how that could be from images only 720 pixels in length. I have only ever made one DVD for a real project, all others have been for demo purposes or just to judge the quality and format issues.

Currently when we create a DVD through PTE, as a part of that change all the images will be reduced to 720*576 for the DVD. I assume there is some variation to allow for format issues, but generally the images we create will be reduced to 720 by whatever. So, it doesn't matter in DVD terms whether we start with a file size of 1920*1080 or 1024*768.

Am I right or wrong here?

[dpeterso]

Since posting this I've done some checking and calculations. The current DVD blanks I use are supposed to hold between 4.2 & 4.7 GB, I now know Blu Ray discs hold around 24GB.

The current charity DVD I am working on is scheduled to run for 1 hour, currently I have 541 pictures which equates to 50min 28secs seconds with the sldes set at between 4 & 8 seconds. This amounts to 130mb of pictures, sized at 1024x768, level 5 in Elements 6. So I estimate I need around another 87 pictures to fill the hour say 20.8mb giving a total volume of say 150mb. The one hour sound track has the music element compiled and this equates to a 55.3mb MP3 file, it stll needs the voice over adding, which is probably 20 of the 60 minute run time. The music continues through the voice over so I believe I would probably be adding another 22mb to the sound track making a total of say 78mb of sound track. I'm not sure I have calculated this correctly, but I'm sure someone will check the figures.

Now using the resolution suggested by others, I re-sized one of the shows raw images which was 23mb out of the camera & when added to Elements 6, showed a resolution of 4752x3168. I re-sized this to 1920x1280 set at the previous level 5, this gave me an image file size of 365kb as opposed to my original 117kb.

Multiplying that by my estimated slide total of 628 gives a total picture file size of 229220kb which I believe is 229.2mb, add the new sound track this gives a total to be burned to a DVD of 307mb. It's late now and my brain is starting to protest. I know previously, maybe Conflow stated the maximum size of show that could be burned to a DVD using PTE's DVD system. I'm almost certain at 307mb, it can't be done. Taking the picture quality to say size 9 or 10 would obviously exacerbate the problem.

To sum up, all the wedding DVD producers, including those who produce shows similar to mine would be in deep s**t by adopting what has been suggested. Obviously Blu Ray would get you over the problem, but I do hear Blu Ray may not be universally adopted as a more efficient system is about to be launched.

I rest my case, bed calls.

Yachtsman1

PS the picture I re-sized is below.

Eric,

Please read my post in response to Barry. The math extrapolations you used are the same that I used until I disproved our assumptions.

Dave

[dpeterso]

Good input Barry -

I did some further testing to assess the impact on a slideshow’s size when using JPEGS saved at “5” (medium quality) as opposed to a “12” (maximum quality).

The original image was shot with a 10-megapixel camera (3888 x 2592), and comes out as a 2258 KB JPEG.

I cropped this 2258 KB image to 1920 x 1080 and saved with the following quality levels:

5 (medium quality) = 105 KB image

12 (maximum quality = 1223 KB image

I then created four slideshows, two with music (4988 KB MP3 song), and two without music.

All four slideshows had the image copied 50 times using a 7 second time with a 3 second fade in/out transition. In other words, I created four 7 x 50 = 350 minute slideshows.

Here are the slideshow sizes:

50 slides saved at “5” with 4988 KB music = 5374 KB

50 slides saved at “5” without music = 386 KB

50 slides saved at “12” with 4988 KB music = 6493 KB

50 slides saved at “12” without music = 1504 KB

These findings really surprised me. Here are my observations:

The music, not the slides are what make the slideshows so large.

The music had no bearing on the size of the show other than its own 4988 KB size.

I have no idea how one can put 50 slides, each at 105 KB in size into a slideshow and come up with a show (without music) at 386 KB. (I would have thought it would be 50 x 105 = 5250 KB). It must be some of that PTE magic!

This experiment doesn’t address the image quality issues however. I don’t have an HDTV, so I can’t experiment and see for myself. However, noticing a difference in image quality between a 5 and a 12, tells me that when one blows it up further, like on a 60” HDTV, the proof will be self-evident. I’m going to begin saving at image quality level of 12.

Dave

I tried to run another experiment to validate my findings as stated above. Unfortunately, something is wrong, somewhere. When I used 13 different pictures, sized at 1920 x 1080, one set saved at a quality level of 5 and the other set at a 12, and then created two shows (without music),the show using the 5s came out at 2.17MB. The show using the 12s came out at 17.4MB. Intuitively, this seems to make more sense than what I stated above. Thus, the jury is still out on what quality level to save at in preparation for a HDTV.

Dave

[Ken Cox]

I tried to run another experiment to validate my findings as stated above. Unfortunately, something is wrong, somewhere. When I used 13 different pictures, sized at 1920 x 1080, one set saved at a quality level of 5 and the other set at a 12, and then created two shows (without music),the show using the 5s came out at 2.17MB. The show using the 12s came out at 17.4MB. Intuitively, this seems to make more sense than what I stated above. Thus, the jury is still out on what quality level to save at in preparation for a HDTV.

Dave

Correct me if i am wrong, due to pte's abilties, the file size does not increase if you use the the same pict several times - it has been that way since day one

ken

[fh1805]

Two points to clarify/confirm/correct from some of the above posts...

Firstly for Eric on the matter of sound files. If the music runs for, say, 55 minutes and the resulting MP3 file is 55MB then adding in the voice-over will not change the file size. Typically, the sound file is composed of 44100 sample points per second. By adding voice-over to the music all you are doing is changing the data of each of those sample points. If you have chosen, let's say, 16-bit encoding then each of those sample points is going to use 16-bits (= 2 bytes) no more and no less. The only remaining factor is the amount of data compression applied in the MPEG routines.

Secondly for Ken. You are correct when you say that PTE stores an image file once irrespective of how many references there are to that image within the sequence. So Dave's tests where he simply repeated his use of a handful of images have produced the correct, if to him unexpected, result.

regards,

Peter