Windows Movie Maker

[tedgrice]

I'm delighted with this program except for two things: (1) I'd like to see a second audio track (maybe this will come with the next update).

(2) The picture quality of scanned pictures deteriorates to an unaceptable point when brought into Windows Movie Maker program. Am I doing something wrong, or not doing something I should, or is it the program? Is it an instance of "you get what you paid for"?

I'm trying to make a documentary of my Mother's life using video, digital pictures, and scanned items. I'm satisfied with PQ of video and digital pictures but scanned pictures just aren't acceptable. I will scan a small, old picture into the computer ( I've saved as jpeg, bmp, and tiff), sharpen it some and they turn out just great. They look great on my 30 " monitor, when viewed full screen; but when imported to WMM they look out of focus to an unacceptable point.

Do I need a better program to do this properly? Sure appreciate any help a Newbie can get.

[canadateck]

what was your output?

[tedgrice]

you mean dpi? I've used dpi from 150-750

[edDV]

What is your video project standard?
How are you importing the video material into the project?

Is a Video-DVD the goal or some other standard?

The first thing you need to decide is what is the most demanding playback goal for this project. If the goal is a Video DVD playable on a DVD player then you should be importing everything to DV-AVI standard.

As for best way to import stills into a DV project, I defer to others more expert than I but your goal is to fit a 720x480 raster at 1x size. Keep in mind that TV sets are overscanned so you need a loose crop on the image. If the image is going to be zoomed or slow panned other considerations and techniques come into play if you want the best result.

Also you should be adjusting the graphics to look best on the video monitor not the computer monitor. Video is interlaced, gamma is non-linear, and color space is YUV not RGB. If you have a MiniDV camera, you can use a monitor attached to it to evaluate quality. The monitor should be calibrated from a colorbar test pattern. Some editing software allows realtime IEEE-1394 monitoring but WMM2 isn't there yet.

[thecoalman]

Resize to 720x480 (if that is the res. your using) soften slightly.... look for gausian blur in your image editor. You may want to consider resizing to something like 710x470 and place on a black background that's 720x480.

Best bet is to get something better than Movie Destroyer. Give Video Studio 8 a try, it's fairly cheap, probably the best all-in-one app there is.