Another vote for Irfanview here.

A 1080 HD video is 1930 x 1080 pixels.
A 3 megapixel still image is about 2048 x 1536 pixels.
You can only get about 1930 x 1080 on a standard 1080 high def project.
Using 10 or 15 megapixel images is overkill and overtaxes your system. Especially with multiple images.

Re-sizing your images to maybe twice HD resolution (to allow for zooms and the like) is likely all you'll need.

RE: re-sizing images ... most folks have some version of Photoshop ... even the consumer version (Photoshop Elements) will re-size your images just fine.

Thanks...that was what I was looking for.

With IrfanView, you can set the minimum size for the shortest edge of your picture, and you can even do this for both the x and y axis. What this lets you do is ensure that ever picture will be resized to a minimum of twice the video framesize on it's shortest side. You can set up a batch file that will do this to all your pictures with lossless png compression. Doing this before you start will make the whole editing experience snappy and pleasant.

I regularly use 8mp size images from my digital camera in Vegas.

What does happen is that when the playhead gets to that image Vegas slows down, sometimes quite a bit, but it should still render fine. Normally lowering my preview quality solves the preview playback issue.

When you're doing an images sequence it handles it like a video, just at the resolution of the images.

There's an excellent discussion of these issues in the following thread.

[Link=http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=392381]

Bottom line is that you want to do your image prep prior to Vegas. I usually batch these in Photoshop to include a bit of Gaussian blur and reducing levels (16-235). It's a lot faster than Vegas and according to the above thread, the quality is better.

wwaag

"Another vote for Irfanview here."

+1
For batch resize, I've found none better.

if you don't like IrfanView (like me), try XnView :)

Exactly what slowed down?

I have Movie Studio 12 and a project with close to 400 jpeg stills, each 12MP (4000x3000) from my GoPro. The program is really slow to create the thumbnails for the events but that means nothing to the edit/play. It does cache up and there is no problem. My machine is an 8GB ram, i7 860 quad core. I typically edit with GPU enabled. Not sure if that matters. I edit at preview auto quality and the res is typically quarter. Every pic, except time lapse sequences, have a crop/pan/zoom/rotate.

Mine is a 9 minute music video and when I load the project and am zoomed out I can slowly watch as it fills in the thumbnails, but I don't wait for that. When I move to the section I want to work on, those get done very quickly.

In the future I would reduce resolution for the photos, and on the odd event you want a major crop, bring in the big image for that photo. I imagine that even with say 7MP photos it will still be somewhat "slow" creating thumbnails.

For those interested in image down-resampling (i.e. resizing), the best algorithms are based on Lanczos interpolation. As such, I write my own applications using the OpenCV libraries because very few commercial applications actually tell you what they are doing. Lanczos interpolation is excellent for not creating moire or other undesireable artifacts and produces excellent quality images.

Peter

Irfanview uses the latest Lanczos. Always has.

For downsizing, it is very hard for the naked eye to tell a difference between Lanczos and plain 'ol bilinear, if there is no appreciable moire. However, I use Irfanview for all my batch resizing because of its versatility.

I've done many projects with large numbers of stills. I've used hundreds of 10+MP images, and i've also done quite a few projects with 10,000 - 25,000 images at HD resolution. Generally i use JPG, though sometimes rarely PNG.

As Norman reports, drawing the thumbnails on the timeline can take some time, but i usually ignore that and just keep working anyway. Vegas chugs along like a champ, not even breaking a sweat.

In the interest of full disclosure though, i still use Vegas Pro 9.

IrfanView also batch converts raw, which can be really useful.

"I've done many projects with large numbers of stills."

And it should just work. Vegas is supposed to now handle Gigapixel images.
It should also handle video in CinemaDNG format (one still image per frame) and at 4K. In fairness having to read thousands of large image files to create thumbnails will slow it down something fierce which is probably why at around the same time these features were added so was the ability to control how many thumbnails are displayed per event.

Bob.

Two tiny nits, Bob. I'm still using version 9, which definitely doesn't have the new still image handling fixes, and for that matter i was doing these sorts of projects under version 3 when that was the rage. Also, the features for how many thumbnails are displayed isn't new. That's also been in Vegas since version 2. It's just that the default used to be "all", while now it's the restricted "head/middle/tail" set.

You're right, just checked V8 and indeed the thumbnail choice is in it with None, Head, Tail, Head-Tail, Head-Centre-Tail, All.

I don't recall exactly when the "Gigapixel" thing was touted as a new feature but yes, I too had been doing projects with very large jpegs in them with V6.

I think my point was more "hey guys, this should just work".

Bob.

If you've ever owned a Canon DSLR, you should have Digital Photo Professional. Always been my fave for batch resizing.

I don't know why Sony does not save thumbnails in the project file. It seems to create the thumbnails every time.

Probably because that might swell a 5MB .veg file into a 500MB file.

"I don't know why Sony does not save thumbnails in the project file"

Don't know about that idea, the project file could end up quite large doing that.
If you select "All" then the project file would contain one image per frame of video.

Keeping them in a temp folder as part of the project's files or some configurable folder would be a better idea I thin.

Same for the waveform files. I really do not like the way Vegas writes those files into the same folder as the media. Then again that's a "feature" we've been requesting since day one.

Bob.

It does it that way so that the .sfk files will be in the same folder as the original media file, which seems perfectly sensible to me, since it applies to that one file and that file only.

The other issue that can come up is that it is very possible to have different media files in different directories that all have the same name ("00001.MTS", for example). This would cause a problem for storing them in some common location, since the .sfk files have the same root name. It would be impossible to store multiple identically named files in the same directory. Vegas would have to add some other unique filename identifier string in with the existing filename in order to keep them straight, and then it would be more difficult for humans to recognize which went with which.

I also think it would be much more likely for people to forget to clean them up when purging old media files if they're not stored in the same directory as the media.

Dunno, but i usually sort my directories by file type. That puts all the .sfk files together, and when i'm done editing a project it's a snap to select them all and delete them, if i want to.

"In the interest of full disclosure though, i still use Vegas Pro 9."

So do I, version 9c to be specific, since it is the last version that at least makes some attempt at smart rendering AVCHD.

One problem with that version, however, is that it doesn't like mixing stills with AVCHD (red thumbnails and/or black images). I therefore render my still or group of stills, with any panning or zooming, in a separate project and render as AVCHD to match my main project. Such clips are smart rendered in the main project, so there is no loss of quality and is rendered very quickly. Because there are usually only a few stills involved in each clip, I don't bother to lower the resolution first to reduce the strain on the RAM budget.