cropping JPGs to fit in DVD movie

[beammeup]

HI,
I hope somebody would have come across this problem before

I'm making a DVD movie, where I'm using scanned photos and
digital pics as well.

The Movie is in PAL 720 x576 format

The photos are various sizes. If I simply insert all the photos
onto the timeline and render at 720 x 576 Pal, a number of the stills will be a little distorted in size, either height, length or both.

It's very time consuming to crop each photo in a photo editor to the exact 720 x 576 size ( or 1440 x 1152 etc ) before creating a timeline with them.

Is there a better way of doing this ?
Does anybody know of any software that will help me out ?

Thanks
Scott

[crusty]

Adobe photoshop is great for this you can setup automated tasks and just by assigning a keystroke you can re-size your images to 720 by 576.

[proxyx99]

check ACDSee, has many batch options, should be able to do that

[crusty]

Yeah so does XN-View but they either will constrain the image making them not PAL standard or re-size them to 720x576 distorting them.

[Renegade6]

Thanks for the help, I had trouble with the same thing.

[dragonkeeper]

to keep pictures that u enlarge as sharp and detailed as the original you can use the photoshop plugin "Ginuine Fractuals" which is said to increase image size 400% with out any pixelation or quality loss. From experince I would say that 200% incrase at most retains the overall quality of the picture, which is still amazingly good.