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Question about scanning pics


photogman

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Hello all,

Newbie here :huh: I'm scanning in some pictures for a 50th birthday gig. Is there any harm with building the project/eventual DVD with pictures at 4x6 @300 dpi? Will the finished DVD run slow with this high of a scan resolution? Also, should the music I add from mp3's be at 320 bit rate to have decent sound quality? Thanks for your help!

PS...I did do a search and nobody really gave a definitive answer on the scanning res/dpi subject.

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photogman,

Welcome to the Forum!

Always scan using as high a resolution as you can handle comfortably - you can readily use images in PTE of 4x6 photos scanned at 300 lpi or more (some systems refer interchangeably to dpi, bpi or ppi). Try to scan at a higher resolution than you will use in the final project.

Once your image has been "digitized" then resize the images by cropping and/or image resizing to the "resolution" of your projector or monitor. PTE will resize images automatically to fit, but it is best to do this externally in Photoshop or other editor first, and then load them into PTE. Depending on your processor speed and video card vintage, memory size, etc., PTE will easily handle images larger than 1280 x 768 pixels, for example. By the way, the "dpi" parameter no longer applies once the image has been digitized, unless you are printing the photo.

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Hello and welcome to the forum!

Your question is a perennial favourite that often confuses new starters. If you scan your pictures at 6 x 4 inches at 300 dpi, what you are actually doing is creating an image with pixel dimensions of 1800 x 1200. This is a simple multiplication of the inches by the scanning resolution. Typically, a DVD show has a pixel width of 720, so there is no real benefit in using pictures at a higher resolution than this.

However, if you intend that at some point the show will be played back on a higher-resolution device (eg hi-res computer, HD or Blu-Ray DVD etc), then there is no harm is scanning at a high resolution to 'future-proof' your show.

Have a look at an article I wrote here for AV News magazine, which might help a bit.

Ian

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Welcome to the world of PTE A-Vs and the user forum photogman, you will find lots of friendly help and advice here.

I'm scanning in some pictures for a 50th birthday gig. Is there any harm with building the project/eventual DVD with pictures at 4x6 @300 dpi? Will the finished DVD run slow with this high of a scan resolution? Also, should the music I add from mp3's be at 320 bit rate to have decent sound quality? Thanks for your help!

As a general rule it is better to do all your scans at the highest resolution/size as possible no-matter what the end result will be. This will ensure that you get the maximum amount of data to work with in any editing software, (eg Photoshop), and give a better end result. You may not wish to do this now but you will have the data for any use you may have in the future.

It is better to discard some information than not have enough at the start and therefor have to do it all again.

See:

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....842&hl=scan

for discussion on scanning.

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