Digital Camera jpgs and DVD Slideshows in Premiere 6.5

[shimonmor]

I used racer-x's tutorial from this site to build a DVD slideshow to play on home DVD players. I used Premiere 6.5 along with the Adobe mpeg-2 encoder which is included and then used Ulead's DVD Workshop 2 to burn to disc. The only thing I did different from the tutorial is that I used the motion effects to add about 110%-120% of zoom in or zoom out to each slide ("Ken Burns" effect).

My problem is that some of the slides come out looking poor...the detail is lost and they shimmer while zomming in. It looks like it came from a poor quality digital camera. The rest of the slides look great. I have about 120 slides.

The ironic part is that all the slides that look bad came from a Canon S70 digicam which is a 7 megapixel camera (3072x2304 pixels 2-5MB file size) I just bought. The rest of the slides came from an old Canon A50 1.3 megapixel camera (1280x960 pixels 300-500KB file size) or from a Nikon LS4000 film scanner (up to 4000x4000 pixels 30MB file size). The two Canon cameras are set to the highest quality jpg and the Nikon scanner files are all TIFFs. When looking at the quality of the photos themselves, the S70 produces much better quality than the A50 which is what I would expect.

I initially thought that maybe since the file size of the S70 is larger than then A50 that maybe when Premiere reduces the file sizes something is lost. But the scanned film photos from the Nikon scanner are much larger and look good just like the Canon A50 pictures. SO...why would the Canon S70 photos look so crappy?

Most of the photos are right out the cameras and are not retouched. I just took a folder of a bunch of photos and imported them into Premiere and didn't resize them to 720x534...I don't care if some of the photos (which are cropped) are not 4:3.

Anyway, any ideas on why a higher quality 7MP camera would have problems in a Premiere slideshow while a cheap 1.3MP camera would shine?

[thecoalman]

Try resizing them or put a slight blur on them. DVD seems to have trouble with sharp crisp lines such as text.

[racer-x]

One very important thing you need to know here, is that Premiere 6.5 and under will resize all your images to 720 x 480 regardless of original size. Premiere pro does not do this though, it maintains original size up to 4000 x 4000 pixel demensions by default.

So if you import an image say at 2100 x 1600, premiere 6.5 will resize it to 720 x 480. This is fine for a still image, but if you zoom in, it will magnify the pixels and make it look poorly. Premiere Pro does a much better job at zooming and panning because it maintains original size up to 4000 x 4000 pixel.

If you want to do a lot of image animation, you should consider upgrading to Premiere Pro or do it for free in Wax2. If you do it in Wax2, you'll have to save it to AVI(I recomend you use Huffyuv), then import the image animation.avi into premiere 6.5 to mix it up with the stills.

P.S. If you use Wax2, Right-click on the image in the timeline and deselect stretch to fit. This will keep the image in original resolution. You can use the Object 3-D or Quick 3-D filter to animate the image any way you like.

Here's a quick little image animation I did with Wax2:

wax.wmv

I had to compress the hell out of it to fit the filesize limit, so it doesn't look anywhere near as good as the original avi, but you get the picture.

Good Luck!

[shimonmor]

Thanks racer-x for your reply (and the original tutorial).

I've thought about upgrading to Pro but it's $200 and I'm not in the mood to drop more cash on software after getting Ulead DVD Workshop. I got my version of Premiere with a DVD drive (an awsome deal!!) and that was the only way I could afford that.

Anyway, I downloaded Wax and am reading through the pdf manual right now.

Do you use it in Premiere as a plug-in or as a standalone? Or does it matter? If you use it in Premiere, will the the files already be resized down to 720x480?

Also, do you have any idea why the 7MP photos would look worse than the 1.3MP pictures when Premiere resizes them?

Thanks for the help.

[shimonmor]

I downloaded the the tryout version of Premiere Pro 1.5 from Adobe and am finding that it's a bit different. For instance...can't find the storyboard feature. Is there an easy way to apply 120 images to the timeline with a default transition between each?

[racer-x]

My only guess is that resizing the 7 MP images down to 720 x 480 applies more softening than the smaller images.

You can use Wax 2 as a plugin in premiere, but I always used it as a standalone.

* In Premiere Pro, import the image folder into the project bin.
* Click on the image folder.
* Click the "Automate to Timeline" button just below the project bin. This will send all images to the Timeline with default transition.

You can also create new Sequences wich will give you more options.
Go to www.wrigleyvideo.com for tutorials on Premiere Pro. It's very different than Premiere 6.5.

[shimonmor]

Thanks racer-x...you've been very helpful.