Plesiosaur billboard

[AProd]

This is the biggest format I ever had to output from A:M for. It only needed to be 30dpi, but at 32 feet wide, I had to crank out about 30K pixels wide. That certainly had my computer begging for more (memory)!

 

I put some pictures of the finished billboard near the top of my home page:

Atkinson Productions web site

[zandoriastudios]

Great job!

[heyvern]

Those darn Canadians and their fossils. Always showing off.

 

Fantastic job!

 

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Many years ago I had to produce a huge gigantic piece of digital artwork for a "new" technology that wrapped buses completely with a huge advertisements (at the time I had dubbed it "King Kong's Advertising Condom").

 

This ad would cover the entire bus... all over the whole thing. The artwork needed was pretty high res but we often cheated by res-ing up lower resolution imagery (that wasn't resolution independent, like text or logos).

 

In the future if you have to do this again, I bet you could get away with a lot smaller rendering and resize it up with some unsharp masking, without any perceptible loss in quality. I have been "cheating" that way for many years and no one ever noticed or complained.

 

Many years ago I needed to produce a 600 dpi photo-illustration poster to promote a new 6 color hi res printing process that had a 300 lpi print resolution (most printing at the time was 133 lpi). Because of hard ware limitations at the time I created the image at 200 dpi instead of 600 and sized it up at the end. The file ended up larger than any hard drive available at the time to hold. The final tiff image was more than 1gb in size. It was so big we couldn't even use photoshop. Had to use this new program from some French guy that just came out that could work on images that big.

 

We ended up splitting the image into 2 pieces and transporting them on separate hard drives. It turned out fantastic, no one ever knew we "cheated". I still have the night terrors.

 

-vern

[Paul Forwood]

Cool!

30 dpi? I guess you can get away with it on a billboard. I used to print out artwork this size at 300 dpi from a large format HP Design Jet for exhibition work. Overkill, I guess, but the clients demanded it.

 

I think you probably hold the record for the largest A:M image.

[Zaryin]

I would love to see a closer look at your model there. That's great that you got your work on a billboard.

[Fuchur]

I would love to see a closer look at your model there. That's great that you got your work on a billboard.

 

For any paper or things you can look at close, you should print with at least 150 better 300 dpi. So your client is most likely right about the 300dpi.

 

*Fuchur*

[Paul Forwood]

Well, you never get that close to a billboard but you can be standing right next to the graphic at a trade show. We used 150dpi occasionally but as most of our clients were publishers of glossy magazines, computer games or high tech companies a pixelated graphic wouldn't do their image any favours.

[MattWBradbury]

I searched for more images on the site found on the billboard, but I only turned up some other small artwork and one fossil.

 

You can see a larger image of the billboard on the site John provided.

[zandoriastudios]

I've printed out large-format tradeshow graphics that look just fine at 50 dpi for an 8 foot wall graphic.

[gazzamataz]

Nice job there Mr Atkinson.

 

If you wanna talk resolution then 300dpi is ideal for magazines, books and things that you look at close up printed on litho or digital printers. 150 dpi is fine for inkjet printers on matt or glossy paper. I have always had arguments with people over resolution for posters. You can get away with a lot less since you will be looking at the item from a distance so you won't see any pixelation.

 

Go up to a billboard and look at it close up - yuk pixelation. I would go as low as 60dpi, higher for exhibition work that you get closer too. Otherwise the higher the res and the bigger the image the more monsterous the file size...

 

You all new that though didn't you