Photo wall file size Q

[munickster]

Cheryl,
I tried to duplicate your situation as best I could. Pro CS4, although I'm an absolute newbie with it - strictly Elements to this point. 4000 x 3000 photo wall with 6 1200 x 900 images (2 rows of 3), all of which had a photo frame applied. Scale to frame size is checked. (I used 300ppi rather than 72 ppi). White background and flattened to a single psd file. The clip is 30 seconds long, with scale, zoom, tilt, and swivel. That clip rendered in under 2 minutes. I did have one problem - the image quality is poor and it looks like there are some deinterlacing issues. That may be my inexperience with Pro there, since I haven't really done any training on how best to set it up.

EDIT - Tried it again without scale to frame size. Quality is much, much better, but rendering is painfully slow. I'll keep playing with this as it's something I'd like to know more about.

Let me know if you would like me to adjust any settings or try anything different.

Dick

[momoffduty]

Thanks Dick for the testing. I have been testing today too. You do have to have the scale to frame size unchecked to get a good quality and I had to adjust the anti-flicker to .50. May try your suggestion of deinterlacing next.

Made a psd with 6 pics & background and saved it 4 different ways:

3,000x2250 with layers 39.8 MB
3,000x2250 merged 16.3 MB
2,000x1500 with layers 18.8 MB
2,000x1500 merged 7.73 MB

Looks like you save quite a bit merging the layers before bringing it into Pro or PrEl. Of course you would want to save as a copy just incase you needed to go back and change a layer. Noticed too that adding the lighting effects in PSE saved on render time versus adding lights in Pro.

When I first tried this photo wall, the psd had layers and was 4,000x3000. And w/all of the effects added guess it was doomed to choke. Probably the best thing is to keep an eye on the total file size and not just the dimensions? Any other suggestions? Thanks.

[munickster]

You do have to have the scale to frame size unchecked to get a good quality...

Yes, Beth's comment started me thinking about that - I had always used scale to frame size on slide shows because it saved me a lot of work. I hadn't realized what a difference it makes on higher resolution images.

Probably the best thing is to keep an eye on the total file size and not just the dimensions?

I've used files as big as 50 MB, and they imported fine in both Pro and Elements, so I'm not sure which is more important.

Here's what I have so far - 2 rows of 3 pics, 1200 x 900 each at 300 ppi. Total file dimensions of 4000 x 3000 at 300 ppi. File size (flattened) is 19MB. I imported the file without scale to frame size and created a 10 second clip with a lot of pans, zooms, and tilts. No lighting effects (yet). It took about 20 minutes to render and image quality is good.

I'm going to see how small of a file I can use and still get good quality, which is, I think, one of the things you want to know.

Dick

[momoffduty]

Thanks Dick. Yes, if there is a magic ballpark number for good clarity and yet a reasonable file size. I am keeping track of my numbers and test as I go.