Photoshop files to be used as title cards in SMS 13

[jonnyD]

What are the settings (JPG, PNG, image size, resolution, etc) I need to concern myself with to create the sharpest Photoshop 7 file to be imported into SMS 13 to be used as a title card? I'm still trying to wrap my head around the differences in video source files, output resolutions and anything else that effects the final video quality. I have also read somewhere that certain color combinations should be avoided for video. Is there a source for this anywhere?

[Steve Grisetti]

For standard definition (720x480) video, we recommend 1000x750. For high-definition, 2000x1500 pixels. Resolution doesn't matter when you're working with video -- but you can use 72 ppi just as a standard.

JPEGs or PNGs will work fine. It really makes no difference -- although, if you're image file includes text, you may want to use PNGs, which produce smoother lines. But JPEGs are fine for photos.

[Bob]

Are you going to be producing High Definition or Standard Definition video?

High Definition is typically 1920x1080 pixels with square pixels, but may also be 1080x720 with square pixels or 1440x1080 with rectangular pixels. In all cases, HD has a frame aspect ratio of 16:9. Assuming you are in North America, Standard Definition is 720x480 with rectangular pixels. The frame aspect ratio can be 4:3 for a standard analog tv "full screen" or 16:9 for wide screen -- the pixel aspect ratio is what makes the difference.

How big to make your photographs will depend on what you are going to do with them. If you want to display them full frame in your video and aren't planning on panning or zooming, you can scale and crop them to the video's frame aspect ratio with the photo's vertical pixel dimension matching the vertical frame pixel dimension. If you are planning on panning or zooming the image, you will need to make it bigger. The recommendations Steve gave you provide for some panning and zooming. Feel free to adjust them, if necessary, to suit your specific needs. Just keep in mind that you should not scale an image up so that the resulting pixel size is larger than the original pixel size. That will degrade the image. Scaling down in the video editor is ok for small to moderate changes, but the scaling algorithms in video editors are usually not as good as the ones in photo editors. Do your preliminary scaling from the camera image to video working size in Photoshop or some other photo editor. If your images are going to be smaller than the video frame size, it's perfectly ok to make them the exact size needed. Jpg and png are both fine. If you need transparency in the image, you will need to use png files.

As for colors, most of the problems were the result of the analog nature of the older tv and broadcast systems. Things that were too dark or too white could cause problems. For example, black text on white could cause buzzing in the audio and very deep blacks could cause the tv to loose sync and the image would roll. Saturated colors were a problem too and you could get bleeding where one color (red was the worst) would smear into the adjacent areas of the image. There was also a thing called chroma crawl where certain colors would creep and crawl around the border of two solid colors -- red on green or blue was particularly bad. Too saturated colors were also a problem. The NTSC set up a standard for broadcast safe colors that addressed some of these issues. I believe Vegas has a broadcast safe filter that will clamp the values for you.

Modern digital TVs don't have many of these problems. But, it doesn't hurt to be broadcast legal and it is still required in many applications. You should still avoid overly saturated and contrasty colors.