Max resolution from image uploads

I’ve been noticing some issues with thumbnail creation when still images with giant resolutions are published.

For example, there was a publish of a jpeg with a resolution of 21000x16000 that would not upload.
I resized it by half and it worked.

Is there an upper limit to upload resolutions? If so might I suggest that the transcoder resize huge images to fit that upper bound instead of just not uploading and giving us no indication that there was a problem.

Thanks!

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Hi @StarkRavenSimone,

Thanks for your message - our transcoder is intended to work as follows for still images:

  • If the media is below 2K, then its current resolution is maintained.
  • If one of (or all) the dimensions is above 2K, we snap the larger dimension to 2048, the other is adjusted according to the ratio of the original media. For example, a 3648x2736 JPG is transcoded into a 2048x1536.

So it should be downressing accordingly as opposed to not working. Is there any chance it’s working, just slowly in the BG since it’s a larger file? Have your tried opening the browser’s Javascript Console on upload to see if there are any errors reported there when you attempt to run through the upload process?

Do you have a sample image you could email to us at support@shotgunsoftware.com so we can take a closer look? You can copy and paste your original query and we can carry on in a support ticket.

Further reading on transcoding resolution:

Cheers,
Beth

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Hi Beth,

I don’t follow how the js console in the browser is going to tell me anything. I’m publishing through the SG app.
How does the SG web interface have any context to what the publisher is doing at any given moment?

I tried to publish it again just now. It’s possible its just taking a long time to transcode but I’ve tried multiple versions days ago that still don’t have thumbnails.

Nothing mentioned in the javascript browser. I’m not sure what I’m looking for at any rate.

Thanks for you help!

Hi @StarkRavenSimone,

Apologies for the confusion, I wasn’t sure if there was an error in SG that was preventing the upload from happening - sometimes the JS console will provide further info where it might be erroring out.

That being said, I spoke to our tech team and it looks like there is an upper limit to the resolution of still images as found in the documentation linked here.

Shotgun’s transcoding service is optimized to handle still image resolutions up to 8K (7,680 x 4,320 pixels)

It looks like your still images are exceeding that limit so the only way around it with our current transcoder is to downres your images before uploading.

Please let me know if you have any further questions!

Cheers,
Beth

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Thanks for you help!

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Despite the docs still stating this, it appears this 8k limit isn’t the case anymore? I just tested using a PSD 30000x15000 and it transcoded just fine.

  • what is the current limit for transcoding still images in SG?
  • is SG still using ImageMagick to convert/transcode still images like PSD files?

We may want to fall back on using another tool for our own PSD transcoding and I wanted to see what SG was currently using since it seems to support fantastically large resolutions!

ffmpeg limitations

Our situation is this:

We’re currently using the GPL Delivery tools in our workflow and their transcoding uses ffmpeg exclusively. While it can transcode PSD files fine, there is an upper limit to the resolution of the media it can transcode. If the limit is exceeded, you get the error:

Picture size 25024x10545 is invalid

So this is the calculation to determine the max resolution for transcoding with ffmpeg:

# media must be less than INT_MAX to transcode correctly with ffmpeg
# INT_MAX = 2147483647
((Width * 8) + 1024)*(Height + 128) < INT_MAX

It appears that INT_MAX is a 32-bit value but this is true even with 64-bit ffmpeg. Admittedly I haven’t dug into the code but a quick search finds this may be because they are using signed ints in the code.?

Sorry, I know this post is overkill, but these details helped us out a lot so I figured I’d share in case someone comes searching for it in the future.

And hoping someone can confirm or correct my questions about SG transcoding above.