2 Replies Latest reply: Feb 16, 2014 7:42 AM by Video My Life RSS

    CS5 Premiere Pro - Mac: Image of Text Degrades When Scale Up (Zoom In)

    Video My Life Community Member

      Good day.  I am given .pdf image files of text to use with my AVCHD video in creating projects to be exported to YouTube and DVD.  My CS5 project will not import .pdf files so I have saved them as .tiff, .png, and .jpeg.  In each case, the text within the image asset is very small and not legible when imported to fit the screen.  So, I use the "Effect Controls" panel to scale up (zoom in) to various areas of the image in order to call out the most relevant text.  The result is the text is extremely blurry and virtually unreadable; nothing I would ever publish.  Here are the particulars:

       

      Camcorder and native clips:

      Sony HDR XR-550V

      AVCHD format 1920 × 1080/60i

      1,920 effective scanning lines and the interlace system.

      The MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 format is adopted to compress video data.

       

      MAC Pro:

      Model Name: Mac Pro

      Model Identifier: MacPro3,1

      Processor Name: Quad Core Intel Xeon

      Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz

      Number Of Processors: 2

      Total Number Of Cores: 8

      L2 Cache (per processor): 12 MB

      Memory: 10 GB

      Bus Speed: 1.6 GHz

       

      Memory:

      Size: 1 GB (x2)

        Type: DDR2 FB-DIMM

        Speed: 800 MHz

       

      Size: 4 GB (x2)

        Type: DDR2 FB-DIMM

        Speed: 800 MHz

       

      Intel ES82 ACHI (x1, Main Drive)

         Capacity:  239.71 GB Total,   92.43 GB Used

        Model: OWC Mercury Electra 3G SSD

       

      Intel ES82 ACHI (x1, Source Files Drive)

        Capacity: 119.69 GB Total,  105.65 GB Used

        Model: OWC Mercury Electra 3G SSD 

        

      Intel ES82 ACHI (x1, Cache and Project Export Drive):

         Capacity: 119.69 GB Total,   89.31 GB Used

         Model: OWC Mercury Electra 3G SSD

       

      Graphics/Displays:

        Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285

        Type: GPU

        Bus: PCIe

        VRAM (Total): 1024 MB

        PCIe Lane Width: x16

       

      Premiere CS5 Settings:

      Project:

      For editing AVCHD Formats recorded in anamorphic 1920x1080 (ex.1440x1080).

      16:9 interlaced HD video at 29.97 frames per second.

      48kHz audio.

      Drop-Frame Timecode numbering.

       

      Editing mode: AVCHD 1080i anamorphic

      Timebase: 29.97fps

       

      Video Settings

      Frame size: 1440h 1080v (1.3333)

      Frame rate: 29.97 frames/second

      Pixel Aspect Ratio: HD Anamorphic 1080 (1.333)

      Fields: Upper Field First

      Audio Settings

      Sample rate: 48000 samples/second

        

      Sequence:

      1440 x 1080

      00;25;05;16, 29.97 fps

      48000 Hz - Stereo

       

      Imported Image Settings:

      Type: JPEG

      File Size: 8.6 MB

      Image Size: 5100 x 6600

      Pixel Depth: 24

      Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0

       

      Type: PNG

      Resolution selected when converting from .pdf: 300

      File Size: 421 KB

      Image Size: 1275 x 1651

      Pixel Depth: 24

      Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0

       

      Type: TIFF

      File Size: 6.0 MB

      Image Size: 1275 x 1651

      Pixel Depth: 24

      Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0

      Compression: Huffman

      Byte Ordering: Macintosh

       

       

      Anything stick out in these specifications, folks?  Thanks for your time!

        • 1. Re: CS5 Premiere Pro - Mac: Image of Text Degrades When Scale Up (Zoom In)
          Ann Bens CommunityMVP

          All that matter is the height and width of the image. Dpi means nothing to video.

          Any scaling you do on a image that is smaller then the sequence gets blurry. Especially text will get unreadeble.

          Your jpeg (5100x6600) should do it. Make sure the Scale to frame size is unchecked. Now you only have to scale it down.

          • 2. Re: CS5 Premiere Pro - Mac: Image of Text Degrades When Scale Up (Zoom In)
            Video My Life Community Member

            Thank you, Ann.  Scaling the .jpg, unfortunately, still led to unreadable text in my case.

             

            So, this is how I made it all come together.  I have used Premiere Pro since version 1.5.  Though I have had Encore, After Effects, Soundbooth, etc. for years I never really had time to learn how to use them.  Like many resolutions, it turned out only a few steps using After Effects gave me the results I sought.  Here it goes:

             

            1. Convert .pdf image to .jpg using best quality possible and 150 dpi.

            2. Open and create new project in After Effects.

            3. In After Effects, click "Composition" > "New Composition".

            4. Composition Settings dialogue box opens.  Name the new composition, I used the preset of "HDTV 1080 29.97 1920 x 1080 square pixels 29.97 frame rate" and set the desired 'duration' (I used two minutes because once back in Premiere Pro I wanted to be able to roll the image and zoom in to call out certain text (the original image is a stats sheet).

            5. Import the .jpg file created in step 1.

            6 Drag the image to the Composition Panel (Preview Panel?).

            7. Click the grab handles around the image and drag to resize the image to fit the preview window.  In my case I wanted to be able to roll the image in Premiere so I resized the image to fit the preview window and then moved the image down so the top of the image was at the top of the preview window.

            8. In the Timeline Panel I clicked the twisty next to the name of my image and then clicked the twisty next to the "Transform".  This allowed me to set a keyframe on "Position" so my composition would begin with the picture at the top of the preview window.

            9. I then mouse clicked and dragged the wand (Current Timeline Indicator) to the far right of the timeline (two minutes) and release the mouse; this placed a keyframe at the end of my timeline.  I then mouse clicked and dragged the image in the Composition Panel as to see the bottom part of the image.  I released the mouse and this then "told" After Effects that when I play the resultant composition I would see the top of the image and it would scroll automatically to the bottom of the image.  I verified this by mouse clicking and dragging the timeline wand left and right to see the image move up and down.

            10. Happy with the size and movement of the image I then clicked "Composition" at the top of the application and then clicked "Add to Render Queue".  The Timeline Panet switches tabs to the "Render Queue" tab.

            11. I changed the "Output Module" to H.264.

            12. On the far right of the Timeline Panel I clicked the "Render" button.  After Effects then created an .mp4 file of the image that I imported into Premiere Pro, and it looks pretty good!  I bet I can make it look even better by tweaking a setting here and there.  I made a few minor adjustments to the .mp4 file in Premiere (keyframing, adjusted scale, etc) and exported the finished project for loading to YouTube.

             

            Thanks!