I have looked but have not found. Somewhere in
the bowels of the internet there must be something
on the subject.

How in Photoshop CS do you create
a huge background that can be used to make
pseudo (nle) pans in something like After Effects.
How is this done for a video that is 720x480
and has 0.9 shaped pixels.

Or, pretend that I have green screened myself
walking and I have a photo of a wall that is
4000x 480 that I would like to use as a
background. Is this possible?

You'd create a 4000x480 canvas in Photoshop and make your background there.

I forget the exact number, but there's a certain cutoff point in After Effects with regards to how wide an image you can import. If you run into this, just split the image and line them up in AE, then set one as the parent to the other so they move togther.

Okay, I appreciate the response.
I was expecting something a little
more difficult. Isn't there a problem
with getting a large panoramic-like
photo into a 0.9 shaped pixel video?
I'll have to test this.

Brad, I am not sure if this will help but Wrigley has a tutorial for Premiere Pro that, (I believe since I havent looked at it lately) makes a photo montage out of a huge photoshop picture. I vaguely remember it was 4000 pixels wide. He put 4 pics in on background and moved between them.

Check this out at http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/videotutorial/tut_premierepro.htm

What I do (or did before photoshop cs which deals natively with the non-square pixels) is for example if I want a background photo that fits the frame exactly is start with 720x540 and then do an image resize to 720x480 which squishes the image, but comes out correct for NTSC.

With a long panorama background just do the same. Start with 4000 (or whatever) by 540 and squish it down to 4000x480. If the height is something else just divide by 1.125 to get the same result.

-Robert