Best Still Photo Size for FCP

It depends a LOT on what you plan to do with the pictures once you get them into fcp. If they're just gonna lay there like a lox, they needn't be any bigger than 720 x 480. Never mind the dpi, there's no such thing in video-- it's just that an exported video frame is interpreted to be 72 dpi by most other applications, as it's the lowest common denominator.

If on the other hand you plan to move across them or zoom in, you'll want them bigger, either twice or three times the size or dpi.

FCP has an upper limit 4000x4000 pixels. As you approach that, FCP slows right down.

Clear as mud?

Lets try again.

DPI (aka resolution) means nothing in video.

The key element is the total pixel dimension.

If you want to pan & zoom, perhaps 2x the 720x480 size might be useful (aka ~1500x1000) The actual dimensions depend of course on the aspect ratio of the original photo.

Cheers,
x

And, in answer to the question specifically, yes. You can leave the dpi of your photos at 72. When you make graphics for video in something such as Photoshop, you generally make them at 72 dpi.
TC

When importing large amounts of digital photos into a project, I've found it helps to record macros within photoshop for tweaking/resizing. I have a few different ones for different sizes. I'm not sure if ps 'elements' allows one to record actions, so this may be irrelevant. They way I've got it set up, I can pull up a photo from within photoshop's file browser and then hit F2 (or whatever key you set up) and it automagically does: auto adjust, resizes, and saves the photo to a special project stills folder. One could probably set up a process to do entire batches in a similar way but I like to see each photo and tweak/clonetool/crop as needed.

"From past experience I have found using higher resolutions caused some problems working in FCP, perhpas it is the file sizes needed to support these high resoulutions.

Your assumption is correct, its the large file size that's slowing down FCP; NOT higher resolutions. As previous posters have pointed out, dpi doesn't matter in videoland. Here's a great explantion of dpi as it does or doesn't relate to video.
http://www.scantips.com/no72dpi.html

Mike

If you are prepping photos before-hand... be sure to prep according to your final usage.. if you plan on zooming in, figure out how close you want to zoom and then prep accordingly.

720x480 or 720x486 (depending on your project settings) are what you should use ONLY if you change the aspect ratio of the photos to 0.9 instead of square pixel. Otherwise the photos will look squeezed on screen.... if you are unable to make the photos 720x480 at 0.9 pixel aspect then create the photos at 720x540 with a square pixel aspect... then scale to fit in FCP.

''When you make graphics for video in something such as Photoshop, you generally make them at 72 dpi''

No you dont
read what Jim and Studio have said;

You only find dpi settings in Photoshop because you can print to paper with it, you dont find dpi settings in FCP, Motion or Boris.

once you bring a stil photo or graphics into FCP, dpi is completly ignored by FCP because it doesnt know what to do with it. You can change the dpi setting to 5, 50 or 5000 in photoshop, FCP will ignore it.

dpi settings can only be used by three dimentional output devices like inkjet printers and film recorders.



read the reference:
http://www.scantips.com/no72dpi.html

G