Huge Banner

[mav88]

Hey Guys,

at work I have to produce a building wrap for the company that is 40m wide x 6m high. A very long rectangle!! I need to put on images as well as text. I was wondering about the resolution of the images and the sizes that i will be able to achieve. Speaking to a printer guy of large banners he said that i will need the image to be 1/4 the size of the proposed final size. So 6m / 4 = 1.5m @ 300dpi. (6m image would then equal 75dpi) Is there any hope for me? I could stitch the image together but that may be impractical. A 10mega pixel camera wont do it and neither will a 35mm neg scan!

Any help or advice??, or have i already answered my own question!

Cheers

 

[ABEC [LU]]

Hey Guys,

at work I have to produce a building wrap for the company that is 40m wide x 6m high. A very long rectangle!! I need to put on images as well as text. I was wondering about the resolution of the images and the sizes that i will be able to achieve. Speaking to a printer guy of large banners he said that i will need the image to be 1/4 the size of the proposed final size. So 6m / 4 = 1.5m @ 300dpi. (6m image would then equal 75dpi) Is there any hope for me? I could stitch the image together but that may be impractical. A 10mega pixel camera wont do it and neither will a 35mm neg scan!

Any help or advice??, or have i already answered my own question!

Cheers

Never done anything that large myself, however, if your printer is giving you a request to have a 1/4 size of the original. Assuming your building is square at 40m per face then depending on your program, I use Adobe Photoshop CS1, create a new project at 1.5m high (6/4) by 40m wide ((40 x 4)/4). I would keep the 300 dpi in this instance. This will create one massive file and your computer will need to have ample amounts of memory available as well as scratch disks. Alternatively you can take this new canvas and divide it into 4 equal sections (sides) and start building that way and stitch them later.

Regarding pictures, just use the highest setting available and scale them accordingly. Keep in mind that scaling will distort images. However, I believe Adobe Photoshop CS2 combats this problem very well intelligently adding pixels vs. stretching as it has done in the pass and many still do.

Again, this is my approach, there is probably a more efficient/better one but seeing as there has not yet been a reply I figured I would offer help.

 

[jimi_81]

Usually for things like this the file is saved as an EPS image file. It will let you scale to any size without losing quality.

 

[Techno Child]

EPS doesn't loose quality? I don't see why you couldn't use a 35mm negative blown up that big for a last resort - even if it's a little distorted up close, being that big it will look just fine when viewed from the right distance.

Why don't you visit a camera shop and see what they have to say - I'm sure there is some commercial camera that you could rent that is made up of multi lenses??? :s

Good Luck!

 

[Not Bman]

If your company is asking you to do something like this, do they not normally do this kind of thing, which would mean they would know.

 

[jimi_81]

i've done graphics for a decal company. i sent them an eps file of an image. you can scale to any size provided the person on the other end has a machine with enough memory.

to give you an idea. i sent a logo, they blew it up and decaled to a passenger van.

 

[mav88]

hey thx for the reply’s,

firstly the imagery is going to be photographic imagery, I think EPS files etc will only scale vector images to an infinite size, ill be using photographs. Working it out I will need a HUGE camera to do this, like 40 mega pixel lol, and a scan of a neg is around 18 mega pixel equivalent. The banner is close to ground level so the quality needs to be the best possible really.

My company hasn’t done anything like this before so its all new to them and to me.

What im gonna have to do is hire a 10 mega pixel camera and then working on the principle that the images height will be half the banner size 128 inches (32" for a quarter of that @ 300dpi) I will need 2.5 / 3 images which will then be stitched together. This is hurting my head already!!

 

[yalooze]

Just remember that because the banner is so big, most people will be viewing it from a fair distance. I think you'll find that when you get up close to most big banners the quality is rather shocking. It's all relative.

If you can do a test print of a small section, try using the one camera and see what it looks like.

 

[mav88]

yalooze - the only problem is that people will be fairly close to the image. The banner is goin on the side of the building, covering floors 1 and 2, of a 2 story building. The building is positioned just off the road, divided by only a footpath and a small stretch of grass. So some walkers by and cars will be no more than 5 - 10 meters away.

Im gona use photoshop to blow up some images to the size and then print em off A3 just to see what the quailty is like