preparing photos for DVD

sleekdigital · Post by **sleekdigital** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 2:46 am

Hello all,

I've been trying different methods of preparing photos for ouput as a DVD slideshow. I first tried what I see recommended on various web sites...

Crop to a 4:3 ratio then scale to 720x480 72 dpi
I use photoshop CS, bicubic sharper interpolation

I also tried just droppping the raw photos into VS 10. These files are 2560x1920

Contrary to my expectations, for most photos, results look better using the original photos, especially in terms of sharpness. I would think preparing the photos in Photoshop would yield better results than letting VS do the grunt work. Am I doing something wrong? Or maybe VS does some things under the hood and having the larger images to work with allows it to do a better job?

I'm interesting in hearing other people's experience in this area.

Note: I am putting these images on the timeline, not using any movie wizards

Thanks,
Steve

zehavi · Post by **zehavi** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 5:48 am

Hello Steve,
Inorder to prepare a DVD slide show, I am using the Ulead software CD&DVD Picture show. No need to use Photoshop, the program deos all the work and the results is great.

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 7:24 am

Hi Steve

720 X 480 is not 4:3 ratio.

If you use this size then you may have to use the ‘Fit to Project ‘option to fill the screen.
This will allow VS to stretch the image to fit. You will see little difference in the distortion. I believe the less VS has to adjust the image the better, it is not an image editor.

If you use 720 x 540 images these are 4:3 and will fill the frame.
When using larger images try to keep the aspect ratio 4:3, your 2560x1920 images are 4:3 and will fit the frame without distortion.

I am in Pal country and found it best to use 768 x 576 images.
Larger images have caused problems with the dreaded pulsating pixels.
Which I recently experienced using vs 10 trial.

Larger images take longer to render than small.

Trevor

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 11:27 am

I have never "prepared" my photos for a slideshow. I just drop the originals in the timeline, sometimes using Fit To Screen, sometimes not, and they always look great.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

sleekdigital · Post by **sleekdigital** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 12:35 pm

Trevor,

I am well aware that 720x480 is not a 4:3 ratio. But I've seen several DVD services that recommend preparing the images as I described... Cropping to a 4:3 ratio THEN resampling to 720x480 due to the non-square pixel concept.

I did not use the "fit to project" option, but what I did (which is probably the same result) do is go to distort and right click in the preview and select "use original size" When I did that the image fills the frame and does not look distorted presumably because VS handles the non square pixel rendering. When I did that it was encouraging, seemed that it was a good procedure. But again for the most part my results were sharper when dropping in hi-rez images to start with.

I've been looking at posts on this forum and it seems that everyone does this thier own way. I guess I will just have to find my own as well. But I am still interested to hear the experiences from other VS users. Especially those who have experimented to find good results.

If anyone knows difinitvely what the best practice is for VS 10, that would be great to hear.

Thanks very much for the responses so far!

-Steve

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 1:26 pm

Hi Steve

If you use 720 X 480 image sizes, selecting any distort option to fill the screen will stretch the image.

People will probably look a little better as the images are stretched vertically. Your subjects will lose a pound or two.

By keeping aspect ratio you will see a black bar top and bottom.

If you are going to the trouble to resize using CS photoshop then I would use 720 x 540. Your image would fit the screen and VS would not distorted them.

Your larger resolution images at 2560x1920 are 4:3 and will not be distorted to fit the frame. Which could be one reason why they look better.

Hopefully other forum users will reply with more options.

Good luck

Trevor

sleekdigital · Post by **sleekdigital** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 2:24 pm

trevor andrew wrote: If you are going to the trouble to resize using CS photoshop then I would use 720 x 540. Your image would fit the screen and VS would not distorted them.
Trevor

Well, I'm trying to make it such that VS does as little processing of the
image as possible. And NTSC DVD output is 720x480.

My photos are not distored at all... I set them to "original size". And since NTSC the output is 720x480 it makes sense to use that size and not get distortion as I observed. My understanding is that the original images you import to a video should be distorted (resampling a 4:3 ratio image to 720x480) to compensate for the non square pixels on TV's. That's why even though NTSC output is 720x480 it ends up displaying at a 4:3 ratio on a TV. This is also why if you do an NTSC template in photoshop you can see that your image looks distorted, but if you turn on the non square pixel preview it will not look distorted.

However VS tries to handle all this for you so maybe preparing images this way is not the best course of action when using VS. Perhaps I need to turn off non square pixel rendering since I am compensating for it when I process the images in photoshop?

The problem I observe is not distortion, its sharpness. And the procedure I discribed does not necesarily yeild "bad" results. I just noticed that starting with hi rez photos yeilded better results for most (not all) photos.

Maybe my understanding is flawed somewhere. Someone please correct me if that is the case.

Thanks,
Steve