Video Resolution and Image Megapixels Requirements

Understanding image output requirements ensures you select the right equipment for capturing video and photographic content, and helps properly estimate storage and post production resources needed to deliver a quality product.

I had a project recently(early 2018) where I needed to deliver numerous videos and photographic images for marketing purposes. The images needed to be suitable for both the Internet, and for printing.

I was asked to evaluate the current state of the market for 4K Video Production, and current trends for digital marketing.

I needed to estimate storage needs(cloud based & local), and determine what equipment to purchase to capture the video and still images, and for post production editing.

I am turning my research on the subject into a blog post for future reference.

Starting with video, I researched resolution of current video standards. The first graphic shows the relative size difference of various video formats.

If you’re planning your next shoot or looking into a video marketing investment, you’ve probably considered 4K or higher. Over the past few years, 4K video has gained quite a bit of popularity.

Youtube started supporting 4K at 60fps video uploads in 2013, and 8K video uploads in 2015. Although understandably small as a proportion of the whole YouTube ingest profile, these formats are still significant and we noticed that the take-up is accelerating.

We were hoping to standardize on 4K video until we discovered that 1 minute of 4K video uncompressed is 32GB in size. 20 minutes of video filmed at 1080, using the Apple ProRes 422 HQ codec, will take about 20 GB of storage space. Using the same codec, 20 minutes of 4K video will take about 200 GB of space.

I would be filming several interviews plus lots of B-roll which would result in several terabytes of raw video files.

Since none of our existing video cameras and drones could capture 4K video, this meant purchasing all new video equipment. After estimating the cost to capture and edit 4K video we elected to go with Full HD(1920 x 1080) for now(early 2018).

I know I will be moving to 4K video in the near future.

I also had a requirement that our photographs were to be used in print campaigns. Some material would be printed at 300dpi, while other material required 600dpi.

I had to ensure that our images were being captured and stored at high enough resolutions to support printing at 600dpi without upscaling or pixel interpolation.

The following table illustrates the pixel resolution we need to support different size prints at different dot per inch targets.

*Typical Resolution. Actual pixel dimensions vary from camera to camera.

**At 150ppi, printed images will have visible pixels and details will look “fuzzy”.

Each colored box represents a certain number of megapixels. The numbers along the top and left side are print dimensions in inches at 300ppi (pixels per inch). Most books and magazines require 300ppi for photo quality. For example, the chart shows that you can make a 5″ x 7″ photo quality print from a 3 megapixel camera.

inches @ 300ppi (numbers inside colored boxes are megapixels)

Notice that as the print size doubles, the megapixels required increases geometrically. You can make nice 8″ x 10″ prints with a 6 or 8 megapixel camera, but to make a true photo quality 16″ x 20″ print, you need between 24 and 30 megapixels. Don’t be fooled by manufacturers’ claims that say you can make 16″ x 20″ prints from an 8 megapixel camera. While you certainly can make a print that size, it will not be true photo quality.

Having gone through this exercise I was able to estimate what new equipment we would need, set some standards for capturing videos and images, and procure the required resources to edit and store the digital assets.

How ‘Facebook Zero’ Will Impact Social Media Marketing

Facebook’s latest algorithm update(Facebook Zero) will have a significant impact on Social Media Marketing efforts on the platform. In this article, you’ll find out what to expect from the changes and learn how you can best maintain interaction and visibility with audiences on the Facebook news feed.

Facebook is making significant changes to its news feed algorithm in an effort to prioritize “meaningful” person-to-person interactions among friends and family over posts from Facebook Pages. Facebook has acknowledged that passively consuming articles or videos that don’t spark engagement or interaction is bad for a person’s mood.

While Facebook still values FB Page content as an important part of their platform’s ecosystem, the news feed will shift the focus from ranking content that’s directly consumed from Pages (which will shrink in reach) to content that is shared and talked about among friends (which will grow).

Reducing or eliminating this may be a positive for their user’s experience, but these updates will result in fewer public posts from FB Pages and fewer videos in user’s news feed unless companies and organizations pay to promote that content.

This will continue to cause a decline in referral traffic from Facebook(which is already down over 25%), a topic I discussed in a previous blog post titled: Referral Traffic Trends: Facebook Declines, Google Grows.

Mark Zuckerberg, said this about the planned updates to the news feed:

“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard – it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

Organic reach for business pages has been declining for a long time. The Facebook Zero algorithm update just accelerates the decline. The chart on this article clearly shows the decrease in organic reach for page posts since 2012.

Facebook is a for-profit company. As such they are financially motivated to slowly decrease the efficacy of their organic (i.e. FREE) advertising in order to make people move to their paid ad platform.

Google did the same thing in their “search engine results” which drove revenue growth for their AdWords Paid Search Advertising service. In a previous blog post I discussed how this ultimately caused Google to lose market share for product searches on the Internet. Amazon now leads Google in Product Searches.

It is why I(along with the European Union) no longer call Google a search engine. I refer to it as a Paid Placement Advertising Service.

WHAT DO THESE CHANGES MEAN FOR FACEBOOK MARKETERS?

If you rely primarily on organic traffic from Facebook, then the Facebook Zero algorithm is bad news.

As Facebook begins to prioritize content that facilitates meaningful people-to-people connections and interactions, marketers can expect the organic reach of their Facebook pages to drop.

Specifically, users will see more posts from people they’re connected to in the news feed and less content from pages they follow. This is a significant change from the previous values of the news feed, which prioritized the total time spent on Facebook and how many people shared posts directly.

Users will also start seeing less video content in the news feed because it typically generates less conversation, particularly public videos.

Facebook will allow your followers the option to select to see your content first in their News Feed, an option that very few if any users will be able to figure out how to set. It also hints that Groups and Live Video may get a boost with the new update.

WHAT TYPE OF CONTENT WILL GET PRIORITIZED IN THE FEED?

Facebook has stated that Posts that spark and inspire conversations and meaningful interactions among people will be prioritized over public content in the news feed after the update.

Content that is shared and commented on will receive a higher prioritization. Comments are more valuable than Likes. Comments on Content that take time and thought to type out will be a positive ranking signal for the Content.

HOW CAN BUSINESSSE AND ORGANIZATIONS RESPOND TO THESE CHANGES?

Instead of posting everything, businesses and organizations will have to be more strategic about the content they post. They need to create posts that promote meaningful connections and interactions among people. Those will be prioritized in the news feed.

It is also wise for businesses and organizations to utilize additional platforms and strategies for getting their content in front of their target audience. If your business doesn’t have an audience on other platforms… now is the time to build those mechanisms.

I will talk more about that in future posts.

Until then, you may be interested in these related posts: Social Media Content Half Life, Big Data & Psychometric Marketing, Marketing Uplift & Predictive Modeling, and Targeted Marketing Models.