Scan Resolution for Stills on DVD

[nwhittle]

I am using Photoshop and Premiere create presentations that include stills, video, and music. I'm trying to figure out what is the optimal resolution to scan is. I then save the stills as jpeg, export timeline as mpeg2 using LSX and then use Sonic DVDit to burn DVD.

I am also still trying to experiment to see whether the text that I add to pictures should be anti alias or not and what is the optimum for clear crisp text.

[Beretta]

Well, monitors have a resolution of about 72dpi. So that is what you'd want to scan at, as a bare minimum. Altho, it certainly wouldn't hurt to scan at 150dpi, as this gives premiere more data to work with, and as a result you are going to get an optimal picture.

One question tho. Since you are concerned (and rightly so) about the quality, why are you using jpegs (which is a lossy compression format). Why not .tiff or even .psd? (Which are both non-lossy formats)

[Darkbird]

Dpi setting for scanner depends on size of source material.

If you are authoring for NTSC, then create images that are 720 wide and 540 pixels high. Next resample the image to size of 720x480. The DVD player's 4:3 output will make corrections for the aspect ratio change.

You should probably use anti-aliasing for the fonts, to smooth out any jaggies. Clear crisp text is going to be pretty well impossible unless you are viewing the output on an HDTV. Regular television bandwidth just isn't high enough to reproduce small details. In fact, most DVD authoring tips that I've seen say to avoid sharp text and even suggest using a small amount of blurring filter to make text look nicer.