How do I guttenberg my digital?

July 6, 2008 2:00 PM

[video/printing filter]I want to take video from Final Cut Pro, export them, and then print them on a grid on paper. I know how to do the first part, but am confused about the printing. How do I do it?

So I can export an image sequence from Final Cut Pro and get a sequentially numbered set of image files in a folder. How do I take said folder and print them so the pictures are at full resolution (640x480), but not just a single picture per page, but as many of them as can fit (with maybe a small border) on a piece of paper and have the slides be sequential? I have use of an epson stylus photo 1400 if this is helpful to the answer. I basically want to print up 1,440 frames on less than 1,440 pieces of paper.

posted by history is a weapon to media & arts (9 comments total)

Photoshop? Just shrink the individual images' dimensions down to however small you want depending on how many you want to fit on the page, and stick them all in a new 8.5x11" document. You can set up a macro in photoshop to resize them so you don't have to de each one individually.
posted by chococat at 2:08 PM on July 6

To be clear, I don't want to resize them(standard video is 640x480 resolution) AND I want to automate the process so I don't have to put together over 1400 images by hand.
posted by history is a weapon at 2:28 PM on July 6

...how much of the page does one image take up?
posted by MadamM at 2:36 PM on July 6

Standard NTSC display resolution is 720x480 not 640x480. You can use the Contact Sheet tool in Photoshop to arrange your image sequence into rows and columns. To access the contact sheet tool just go to File>Automate>Contact Sheet and choose your folder of images. It's a pretty straight forward process, though you might want to test the printing with a small number of images first.
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb at 2:45 PM on July 6

I also might add that you should check your images for interlacing and make any changes before creating your contact sheets.
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb at 2:49 PM on July 6

This answer is probably impractical, but if you have access to Adobe Lightroom, you can easily do this and customize it to whatever number of images you want per sheet. You could do 8x8 landscape if you'd like and fit 1,440 images on 23 pages. I'm sure they have a trial version if you don't think you'll ever use the program for anything but this.

Example: http://rocketsilence.com/mefi/mefi_lightroomprinting.png
posted by cgomez at 2:55 PM on July 6

You're missing a piece of information as to the dpi you want to print at. 640x480 at 300 DPI which is a pretty standard low print setting for images will be just under 2 1/2 inches wide for example. The same 640x480 at 72 DPI (monitor resolution) will be considerably wider (like 9" wide)
posted by merocet at 3:15 PM on July 6

The issue here is that (reasonably) the print resolution is higher than your screen.

Your printer, likely prints 300dpi or higher...but your screen is 72dpi. So, as you increase the density of the dots.....the image gets smaller.

You could take a folder full of these and print them 16 + to a page with Preview. It'd look like this. 16 to a page is 90 pages.

No automation necessary. Select all, print, they open in preview, then just change the print dialog to 16 up.
posted by filmgeek at 6:06 PM on July 6

If you have Adobe Creative Suite you can do this in Bridge. Open the image folder in Bridge and under "Tools" you can create a contact sheet in either Photoshop or InDesign. I like InDesign contact sheets better. Then you can choose the orientation of the page and how many pictures you want on each page--this will determine the size they print at. When I choose pictures that are 640x480 and make a contact sheet that is 3 columns, 4 rows, the pictures end up being perfectly resized at 300 dpi, which is perfect for printing on your Epson. You can then go into the Object styles in InDesign to change the image frames to your preference, and the Paragraph styles if you want to change the image labels.
posted by chelseagirl at 7:49 PM on July 6