Quality loss putting still pictures on a DVD

[paultje]

Hello,
I've made some 3mb pictures, resolution 2000 * 1500. I've also made a short movie with my photo camera, resolution 300 * 200. Using Pinnacle Studio 8 I created a DVD with the pictures and the movie. I've added some transitions between pictures and background music.
There is something wrong with my pictures, they look horrible!!!
It looks like they have a very low resolution.
Do I have to convert the pictures first to a DVD-resolution? (720 * 520)

Thanks for your help,
Paul

[petar]

Your authoring application resizes the picture to a DVD compliant resolution so 2000 * 1500 is not what you'll get on your DVD. They shouldn't look horrible though (but this is very subjective, I guess).

Resize it yourself before authoring and see if it looks OK or not. If you have a TV output compare it on your TV set because the picture doesn't look the same on a PC monitor as on a TV set.

Also remember that the picture is compressed on a DVD in an MPEG stream which is a lossy compression so you're lossing some quality there too, not just in the resizing.

[paultje]

I've compared the DVD with my pictures in a 640*480 resolution on my pc. The pictures in a 640 * 480 reolution look much better then the images on the dvd. Should I try another codec when creating the dvd?

[petar]

Try this.

Encode one of your pictures with your encoding appication. Use 8000 kbps and resolution of 720 x 576/480 (depends if you use PAL or NTSC). You'll get a small mpeg2 elementary stream made up of one I frame. Play it with your software DVD player (in repeat mode, otherwise you won't see it). How's the quality?

If it's better then try a different authoring application. Maybe the one you're using isn't encoding the still images were well.

If it's the same then, I guess, that's the best you can get. Try playing with the picture colours (gamma, contrast, etc.) and see if you get any better quality encoding that way. As I mentioned before, MPEG2 is a lossy compression and was designed for moving images. On a still image you'll find a lot of distortion.

[jg0001]

You don't need to manually resize the photos -- that is just an unneccessary hassle. You only may wish to resize if there is an unwanted amount of cropping done to match aspect ratios.

Some programs do a better job at putting together slide shows and pictures than others. I recommend you first just tryout a DVD slideshow maker and see how the quality compares to what you have already (there are numerous trial programs you can use for the... try Ulead's product).

A rather circuitous method you can try (is you have WinXP) is to use MovieMaker2 (part of WinXP) and create a slideshow with that. Export the 'movie' as DV-AVI (yeah, it'll be a huge file) and then use that AVI in Studio, or whatever, to convert to a DVD compliant format.

I had a similar problem when I used to make VCD slideshows. Without the proper setup, the pictures looked just awful. You truly do need something that can handle still imagery carefully to get best results.

[jg0001]

Not to repeat myself, but having gone through the same process as you with Studio 8, I highly recommend you try one of my suggestions above before pulling your hair out. Either use Ulead (?DVD Picture Show) to create & master the DVD or use MovieMaker2 to make an AVI you can bring into Studio 8.

[paultje]

Ok, thank you all for your suggestions. I'm going to give it a try this weekend. I'll let you know.....

[donpedro]

Now don't take what I am going to write now as truth, but I think that I was readig somewhere that Pinnacle Studio is not very good at resizing and solution was to use different tool to create picture files to proper size beforehand. If you are still trying to us PS8 to do that, try Help file. There might be some info about picture size.

BTW: Did you try to resize picture on coputer ? You might find big differences in different programs too.

[paultje]

I've detected that I'm losing quality in the resizing procedure. I did the following: First I reduced the size of the pictures using PaintShop. I selected the option "Balanced" in stead of "Pixels" and that solved a lot. There is also an option about keeping printresolution. Not sure what those options exactly do right now but it worked. Then I created the DVD wth PinnacleStudio and the picture-quality is acceptable!! I didn't found resizing-options like that in PinnacleStudio. For now I think PinnacleStudio isn't very good at reducing picture size but I'm going to look into it. I'm also going to give it a try with ULead. At the moment I've a reasonable DVD of my holiday pictures