Resize and reshape stills for the time line ?

[knockatoone]

The need to down size stills for use on the time line is an accepted practice and Steve G gives recomended sizes in his Guide to PE 10. Is it worth while to also change shape to an aspect ratio of 16:9 for an HD video project..??
Doing this "manually" gives you control of the "cropping". I have found that some cameras/camcorders have available a 16:9 aspect ratio format (for stills as well as video) ??
Is it worth doing ??
Thanks, K

[Bob]

Is it worth while to also change shape to an aspect ratio of 16:9 for an HD video project..??

There's seldom any need to do that. You can always scale the still image and adjust the position within Premiere Elements to achieve the same appearance. (Be sure Scale to Frame Size is off.) If you pre-crop, you will be cutting off part of the image that you could have used for pan and scan. I wouldn't crop that way unless the image was to be displayed full frame without any panning or zooming. But, it's your preference.

Premiere Elements 10, especially the 64-bit version, has much better memory management than older versions. But, It's still worth while to resize stills to an appropriate size. Stills are generally much larger than a video frame and using a lot of full size stills could create memory problems.

[George Tyndall]

The need to down size stills for use on the time line is an accepted practice and Steve G gives recomended sizes in his Guide to PE 10. Is it worth while to also change shape to an aspect ratio of 16:9 for an HD video project..??
Doing this "manually" gives you control of the "cropping". I have found that some cameras/camcorders have available a 16:9 aspect ratio format (for stills as well as video) ??
Is it worth doing ??
Thanks, K

If you are making the stills with your HD camcorder and you choose the correct still setting, then they will be HD 16:9 and, therefore, no need to crop them to 16:9.

Alternatively, there are inexpensive still cameras that will shoot in the 16:9 format and give a better result than the HV30.

P.S. In my experience with the Canon HV30, stills that are made for the memory card while the tape is running--while making the video--look better than those made with the tape off, in terms of the stills matching the video frames. When I tried making some of my stills with a second juxtaposed HV30 with the tape turned off, they not did match the video frames from the other HV30 as well.

[knockatoone]

Thanks for your replies, K