Slideshow Help

[GuyinBrown]

Hello,

I'm trying to put a slideshow together from some still pictures that I took at my daughter's soccer tournament and would like it to look as sharp as possible. I've put a couple shows together using ProShow Gold and they just don't come out as sharp as I'd like. I'm shooting the pictures with a 10mp camera so the resolution shouldn't be an issue. The pictures are in .jpg format at 72dpi and are quite sharp when viewed on the computer. If I use Photoshop to upsample them to say 150dpi, would that make them any sharper when they're played back on my TV?

Also, I understand that the highest resolution a standard DVD can play is 720x480, but is there any way to use the full 16:9 aspect ratio of my HDTV for playback? There must be some way to do it, we only have a standard DVD player and frequently watch DVD movies that fill the entire screen without any letterbox bars.

I'm willing to sacrifice the full 16:9 aspect ratio if I can get them to come out sharper at 720X480....


Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

[poisondeathray]

Of course the pictures look sharp. But the limitation here is the DVD-Video standard. You are shrinking the pictures by a factor of ~28. The 720x480 is low resolution compared to the original image dimension.

If your pictures were taken as 16:9 aspect ratio, then you could make a 16:9 DVD and fill the HDTV. If they were not 16:9 (eg. if they were taken "upright" instead of "landscape" type), to keep the aspect ratio, it would need to be scaled to fit and pillar boxing (black borders left and right), otherwise you can crop and zoom in, but you would lose some of the picture

You could try sharpening filters or other encoders, but it will still look bad, because of the low resolution. "Upsampling" to a higher DPI in photoshop won't do a thing. In video (as opposed to print), everything is pixel based. Only Blu-ray would give you significantly better results, or connecting with HTPC, or mediabox

[GuyinBrown]

Well you've confirmed my fears... I'm stuck with crappy quality.

I'm just confused why I can watch a standard definition DVD Movie and the quality is perfectly acceptable but the pictures are slightly blurred ( but are razor sharp on the computer). Is there a difference between video and a still picture when it's rendered? Regardless, it is what it is for now...

Thank you for the help....

[poisondeathray]

The standard def DVD will be upscaled by your DVD player and/or HDTV, so it will be a bit blurry.... but there still might be some things you can "tweak"

I haven't used proshow in a few years, but it's not the first time I've heard complaints about the encoder. I recall people trying to use other encoders by rendering out a lossless avi, then using another MPEG2 encoder and authoring application to make the DVD

How long is your compilation (hours/minutes?) If it's too long, a lower bitrate is used in order to fit to the disc, this negatively impacts quality

Did you use maximum quality settings? 2pass?

How does the DVD look on the PC monitor (i.e. play the DVD on the PC)?

[GuyinBrown]

It's going to be relatively short. I'm setting each game to music and they played 3 games... so about 15 minutes total - plenty of room to fit it onto the DVD.

I set everything to maximum quality and turned off the anti-flicker option which sharpened it up a little bit, but still not where I'd like to see it.

I have access to Sony Vegas and it's companion, DVD Architect 4.5 so I suppose I can give that a try to see if it's simply the ProShow encoder turning everything to crap...