Preparing photos for video with Apple Aperture

One of the cool things about pictures is that you can use display them in many different ways, on a computer screen as your desktop wallpaper, on a website, print them on paper, make slideshow or in a video or DVD.

Working with video can be confusing when you have to deal with colormodels, framerates, interlacing, resolutions, and aspect ratios which you all have to consider. Photographers looking for a way to deliver their pictures with the best quality possible should take a look here.

This article describes how you can get the best results with images that you manage with Apple Aperture for using them in a video project made with software like Final Cut Studio.

Video formats

Before you do anything else you should know, what kind of video is being produced. The following table provides you with a list of different video formats and their resolutions.

Format	Aspect	Starting dimension	Rescale dimension	Definition
NTSC	4:3	720 x 534	720 x 480	standard
NTSC	16:9	864 x 480	720 x 480	standard
PAL	4:3	768 x 576	720 x 576	standard
PAL	16:9	1024 x 576	720 x 576	standard
480p (NTSC)	16:9	864 x 480	720 x 480	high
576p (PAL)	16:9	1024 x 576	720 x 576	high
720p	16:9	1280 x 720	1280 x 720	high
1080i	16:9	1920 x 1080	1440 x 1080	high
1080p	16:9	1920 x 1080	1920 x 1080	high

You may wonder what the difference is between the starting dimension and the rescale dimension. This is because pixels are not always square. It might seem a little strange at first, because in computing pixels are practically always square, but in video they are not. They are often stretched a bit which makes them rectangular.

This means that if you scale an image with square pixels to the same resolution as a video each square pixels will be displayed as a rectangular one, stretching the image. In that case TV will really make you look fat.

In order to counteract this you need to provide the video application with an image that is wider, so it can compensate for the stretching by squeezing the image first.

Select images

Open up Aperture and select the project that you want to take images from to put in your video. Create a new album and put all the images that you want in your video inside it.

Because we are going to crop them to different aspect ratios it might be a good idea to make a new version of the images so that the last version remains untouched.

Select all the images in the album and select 'Duplicate version' from the menu 'Images'. Now each image will be in a stack with the second version showing.

Crop images

Digital cameras take pictures with aspect ratios of 4:3 and 3:2. Unless you want borders on the sides of the screen you will need to crop the images to the aspect ratio of the video, which is either 4:3 or 16:9.

Additionally you might also want to crop images in portrait mode to landscape mode, like image shown here on the right.

Now select the images one by one and use the cropping tool [C] to crop of the unwanted areas. A little semi-transparent window appears in which you can set the aspect ratio. Check the checkbox and enter 4 and 3 for with and height or 16 and 9 if you are working with widescreen video.

If you are working with standard definition video you should be aware that the low resolution of the video will make details in the image disappear, you can counteract this by cropping off larger parts of the image so that the remaining image will appear larger.

You should also be aware of something called overscan. On analog displays often some parts of the image are cropped off. If you place something too close to the edge of the image it might not show on the screen. This is especially troublesome when working with text. That is why all text should appear with in the 'title safe area' of the screen. Video applications can show an overlay of where this area is.

Export images

Once you are done cropping the images the only thing left to do is to export them. Select the images, and go to the menu 'File' and choose 'Export' and then 'Export Versions...'.

In the File dialog click on the selectbox with the label 'Export Preset' and choose 'Edit...' on the bottom of the list.

Now the window 'Export Presets' opens. Click the plus-button on the bottom left corner to add a preset.

The image format can be anything, except JPEG because that would degrade the image quality. Different video applications can use different formats. DVD Studio Pro 4 for example can't use PNG. The safest option in this case is TIFF.

There is no need to choose TIFF-16, you won't see the difference in video anyway. It is not necessary to include the metadata, some video applications may use it, so it doesn't hurt to include it anyway.

Set the size to fit within pixels and enter the starting resolution of the table earlier in this article.

If you are working with PAL video select the 'PAL/SECAM' ColorSync Profile. If you are working with NTSC, select 'NTSC (1953)'.

Leave Black Point Compensation on, it ensure that black in your image will also be black on the video with a different colorspace.

Give your preset a sensible name and click the 'OK'-button. If you haven't done so already browse to the directory you want to save the images in and press the button 'Export Versions'.

The resulting files are now ready to be imported into a video application.