Rendered Slideshow Video Quality in Studio 7 Stinks...

[leroyknuckles]

I created a slideshow from jpg images using Pinnacle Studio 7,
adding transitions and background music. I then rendered the
mpeg movie using various output presets (VCD, SVCD, DVD,
etc.) However, when I then look at the rendered movie inside
Windows Media Player, the quality is awful. It's all pixelated,
regardless of the movie output settings I use in Studio 7. The
DVD preset produces less a less-pixelated movie, but the colors
look heavily posterized.

When I import the mpegs into authoring software (Pinnacle
Expression) and I preview them, they still look awful.

Can anyone shed some light on why Studio 7 rendering looks
so crummy? By comparison, the same slideshow created and
rendered in Pinnacle Expression produces video that looks a
lot better. I'd use Expression, except that it isn't nearly
as flexible as Studio 7.

Is there a way to produce better quality video output from
Studio 7? This S/W does everything I want it to do, except
produce acceptable quality video!

[mustang581]

I have used studio7 for most of my editing to create VCD's but I do not encode with Studio. I output the file back to an avi and encode with TMPGEnc.
I do not think you will get better quality out of Studio7.

[leroyknuckles]

I went back and had Studio 7 output the slideshow movie to an AVI
file. When I viewed the movie in the Windows Media Player, it did
not look much better than the various rendered MPGs that I had
produced earlier with Studio 7. I was able to import the AVI
directly into Pinnacle Expression to author a VCD, without having
to encode it with TMPGEnc first. The video quality (both previewed
inside Expression and on the final burned VCD) for the slideshow
was again terrible. I don't think encoding the AVI before importing
into Expresison will change the results.

The Pinnacle S/W ain't cutting it. Too bad. I really liked Studio 7's
editing features (especially SmartSound), but I can't get it to produce
a decent quality video of any format. Expression produces decent
quality video, but it's editing capabilities suck.

I guess I'm back to hunting for a decent slideshow program. Sigh.

[donpedro]

What is exact version of your Pinnacle Studio7 ?

What is resolution of your JPG files ?

[leroyknuckles]

What is exact version of your Pinnacle Studio7 ?

I am using Studio 7, version 7.15.1 (downloaded patch).

What is resolution of your JPG files ?

They are 1200x1600, encoded to "higher quality" JPG levels using
Photoshop. The JPG files are typically 350KB.

These same JPGs look decent in a Pinnacle Expression-rendered
slideshow video, using its simpler transition and background music
effects. However, they look like crap in any Studio 7-rendered
video, using its fancier transitions and background music effects.

I'd like to get the Expression-rendered video quality (not great
but acceptable), using Studio 7's editing capabilities. I don't know
why this should be so hard. It's driving me nuts....

[donpedro]

Based on what I was reading long time ago and now in help file, try to resize couple of picture to DVD resolution before you will use them in PS7. Let me know if it helped.

[CogoSWSDS]

Have you tried Joern Thiemann's Slide Show Movie Maker? It's Freeware and available from http://www.joern-thiemann.de/tools. You can pick your .jpg or .bmp files, an audio .wav file, add in some transition effects and render the whole thing to an .avi using your favorite codec as long as you keep the avi size to under 2gb. I've played around with it a little bit and it doesn't look too bad. Kinda slow to render in spots though usually where you have a transition from one slide to another.

CogoSWSDS

[leroyknuckles]

Based on what I was reading long time ago and now in help file, try to resize couple of picture to DVD resolution before you will use them in PS7. Let me know if it helped.

I downsampled a bunch of images to 352x240 using Photoshop, since I'm burning to VCD, and I wanted to avoid Studio doing any resampling. I then pulled them into Studio 7 and re-rendered the slideshow movie. It didn't work. The movie quality was still as crappy as before. I'm giving up on Studio 7. I can't make it produce a decent quality slideshow movie. I can't believe anyone could be satisfied with what it produces.

Have you tried Joern Thiemann's Slide Show Movie Maker? It's Freeware and available from http://www.joern-thiemann.de/tools.

I haven't tried this yet. I wanted to try to stick to a single package to keep things simple, rather than having to run a pile of tools. But I may not have a choice now....