Still Images are distorted w/pinnacle 7

[jkpaulson]

Hi all-

I am a beginner, so thanks in advance for patience. I have Pinnacle 7 that a friend gave me. I have made a show of still images. I am unable to figure out how to get the finished product to fill the tv screen and have undistorted images. I have gotten a finished product that had good clairty before, however the image was about a 1/4 size of the tv screen. Can someone tell me what I am missing?

Many Thanks....

Kristi

[cdcox]

I used to use pinnacle studio 7 and it sound to me like you may be using pictures with different aspect ratios and studio is trying to make them fit the whole screen and it is throwing it into distortion. To fill a screen and be undistored try using a picture with the pixel size of 800X600 at minimum or 1600X1200. These should come out on the screen as full screen and not be distorted. On the other hand if you use a picture with a 400x368, pinnacle may distort it, the work around I used for that type of picture is this, open up the title maker and import the photo, drag your corners to fill the tv safe zone. If you hold down the shift key while you drag, it should help keep the proper aspect ratio, and help you to enlarge the picture. This method will also help you use a background of the same color for every photo, black works the best, where as importing the pic to the timeline, studio will randomly pick background colors for you. I did not like this myself.

One more work around which will add more work to your project is this,
if you have photoshop, you can make a 800x600 color background, open up your photo that may be 400x356 or some other size, copy the whole picture and paste it on the color background you just made, center and size it to your likeing, merge the layers and save it as a .bmp and import that pic to your timeline in studio. It should come out undistorted.
alot of info ya, I hope I didn't confuse ya. It's much easier to show someone than it is to explain it in typing it out.

[jkpaulson]

cdcox-

Thanks. my photos are almost all 1200x1600. I'm wondering if the problem is in my settings when rendering. I would like to do burn either a svcd or dvd. For grins can you tell me what steps and settings you typically use for this? I have read info on codec's, quite frankly I really don't understand it much, but wonder if this could be causing a problem, too. I see that the MPEG has default settings for the vcd, svcd, and dvd. The only way to get an option is in the custom setting. This is where I start losing my way....all the options.

[cdcox]

I always export as DV .avi and encode to mpeg2 with tmpeg this is a better encoder than the one that comes with pinnacle. You can try the Mpeg presets for DVD or set to custom and use the following settings
Mpeg2 for DVD 720x480 set bitrate to 6000kbs audio set to 48khz at 224kbs. The higher the bitrate the better the picture quality will be 6000 is a good average. Depending on how long the total video is will determine the bitrate you can use. The longer the video the lower the bitrate must be to come out with the correct file size for the DVD. When you say your pictures are distorted, do you mean they look like they have been stretched or squashed in the picture? Because that should not happen when encoding. I quit using studio 7.0 a while ago but I still have it on my machine. So I'll try to help ya as much as I can. Also are your photos portrait or landscape type? Not meaning the type to picture but how you look at it.

[jkpaulson]

hey cdcox-

I really appreciate your willingness to help out. However, I don't have the patience it seems that this is going to take with Pinnacle. I have gotten a trial version of MemoriesOnTV and had instant sucess. So for now, I'm going to stick with that. Pinnacle will have to wait for me to gain more experience.

Thanks a million!