Work with large PNG images?

[blues]

I'm working with very large, scanned PNG images (scanned at 1200 optical "dpi") and when I import them I can only see a small portion of the image at first. I used the zoom camera to shrink the image but there seems to be a limit to how far out I can zoom? As an example one of the images I'm using has the dimensions of 13560 x 9600. It almost fits in the blue rectangle when I zoom out completely but not quite. Is there a limit on image size in Anime Studio Pro? I want to keep my images with maximum pixels that Anime Studio can work with since I'm not working with vectors and I want my animations to be able to be shown on extremely large HD screens if necessary without pixelation. I created a test animation with my partially shown images and successfully exported them as a PNG sequence into After Effects and then exported as a quicktime mov. The quality is great but the animations are only showing 3/4 of my characters/scenery at a time (whatever I put in the blue rectangle). Do I need to scan at a lower dpi or is there someway I can fit my images into the blue rectangle? I REALLY don't want to lose quality.

[Pinesal]

Just shrink the layer. Shrinking the layer doesn't change the dpi.

[heyvern]

13560 px? You are over 3 times 4k resolution. So if you are rendering to 4k resolution, you could do a zoom in closeup of that image 300%. I think possibly your image size is much too big unless you have a specific reason for it.

You also mention "Zooming" the camera to reduce the image size? Is that correct or a mistype? You are zooming not scaling the layer correct? You should be using the scale layer tool, not the camera zoom tool. Press "M" on the keyboard, which gives you the layer manipulation handles. Grab a corner of the layer and scale it down.

[slowtiger]

I'm using images in that size range with no problems. See the result here: https://vimeo.com/51438218

AS imports any image as 72 DPI. Let's assume you work in full HD, 1920 x 1080 px. An image of exact these dimensions will fit perfectly within the blue rectangle of your project after import, and it will render in exact this quality.

Now I want to zoom in without loss of quality. Let's say I want to zoom in 3x. The middle portion of my image must still have at least 1920 x 1080 px, so I multiple these dimension with 3 and get this:

My image must be at least 5760 x 3240 px large to maintain quality while zoomed in.

Don't use DPI while you do animation. You scan program should be able to give you the exact pixel dimensions of your scan. You just have to do some math if not. Anyway, any image viewer as well as Photoshop or any other bitmap program will give you the pixel dimensions. (On OSX even the finder does this, you don't even have to open the image.)

There's no sense in overscanning. You only get very large files and slow down AS while rendering. Something like 120 - 150% is OK, but everything else is overkill and will not increase your image quality.

Within AS, you scale down images with the scale tool (2). There's no limit I'm aware of other than the handles getting too small to grab - I zoom in a bit and scale again. I do expect some glitches with images over 10.000 px width (very rarely), however, but these seem to happen during creation of the image files, not within AS, and may come from a limit within the PNG format.

(I can't find my post about it, but here's a link to a test with an "endless" zoom:
http://www.slowtiger.de/examples/zoom_in1c.mov)

[hayasidist]

... I used the zoom camera to shrink the image but there seems to be a limit to how far out I can zoom?

yes - there is a limit on zoom (fully wide is 160 down to 0.25); but another way to see "all" the image is to track out - that is to change the camera z position (make it larger than the default 1.73) - shortcut key is 4; or move the image layer back (change the layer z to be smaller that the default of zero) - shortcut key is M; or some combination of both.

and, agreeing with slowtiger, I have scenes that far exceed the bounds of the blue rectangle and I use zoom and move the camera around in x,y and z - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjFulEo2auw for example - all AS vectors though, not PNGs

[blues]

Thanks, guys! This is incredibly helpful! I really appreciate it!