pixels for film

astral_supreme wrote on 11/24/2002, 3:44 AM

Hello guru's....

I have a quick question regarding bluescreen effect. I want to shoot somebody walking in bluescreen and then "change" the bluescreen into a still image background.

The background image will be made of pictures that are layered together in adobe photoshop 7..then some basic effects and shadows will be "painted" on to this picture.

The original pictures that will be combined into the background image will be taken from a digitial camera.

The question I have: Is a camera with 210,000 mega pixels enough pixels to provide proper resolution? The final background image will be placed in the vegas timeline...then the finished movie exported to dvfilmaker...then the true 24p video will be transfered to film for theater release.

In the theater will the background be detailed enough...or do you need more megapixels?

this effect can be seen in "Starwars" and "Lord of the rings" they use still image backgrounds that dont change...the camera simply zooms into the pic and pans from left to right while the actor walks.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 11/24/2002, 7:59 AM

I guess that depends on how far you'll be zooming in on these background images. Since you're exporting to DV before going to film, you will have a final resolution of 720x480 (assuming NTSC). As long as you don't zoom in so far that the displayed area of the backgrounds is less than this, then you'll have the maximum resolution available to you.

I'm guessing you've mistyped the resolution of the camera. 210,000 megapixels would be about 541,850x406,387 pixels and would probably require over 20GB to store each JPEG image. I WANT one! ;) By any chance, did you mean 2.1 megapixel? This would probably be 1600x1200 which would mean you could zoom in about 2.5:1 before losing any resolution.

astral_supreme wrote on 11/25/2002, 1:32 AM

oops....i did type the pixels wrong but thanks for the tip

EW wrote on 11/25/2002, 7:32 AM

Chien,
What about the dpi for the digital photos, does it matter? My digital camera transfers the pics to the computer as 72dpi.

Chienworks wrote on 11/25/2002, 11:03 AM

EW: ignore that completely. The only time that EVER matters is when you're flatbed scanning and printing on paper. Video, web and on-screen displays make no use of DPI whatsoever.