Poor quality DVD slide show from jpeg still photos

[lancecarr]

Of course you can mix the input clips to your heart's content. Hell, you can put a bagel in there if you want!

The point I was making and that Ken was making was that if you do mix those things together you will get unreliable results. This is not a shortcoming of the software, the same would happen with Power Director or any other consumer level editing suite.
It all depends on what your final output file will be and what quality you are looking for.

[Ken Berry]

In effect, it is not easy to convert Upper Field First (UFF) to Lower (LFF), and probably requires equipment and software which is way beyond most normal home editors' wallets.

If you think about it, UFF films and then broadcasts lines 1 - 3 - 5 - 7 - etc first, quickly followed by lines 2 - 4 - 6 - 8 etc and together the eye puts them together and sees a single image. And vice versa for LFF.

But if you mix UFF and LFF video together in one project and then render it to a new file using, say, UFF, then the LFF which is supposed to show lines 2 - 4 - 6 - 8 first, instead will be forced to display lines 1 - 3 - 5 - 7 first. This might not sound such a big thing. And for normal, tranquil video shots, the eye might not perceive anything wrong.

However, for rapid movements or action shots, or when panning and zooming, the eye *will* perceive that something is wrong and will perceive the rapid motion as being slightly jerky or uneven. And if there are strong vertical lines involved e.g. the edges of buildings, then the eye will see these as appearing to be somewhat jagged (the dreaded 'jaggies').

As Lance said, this is *not* just the behaviour of Video Studio. Other home video editing packages will do the same thing...

The exception is frame based video in a slideshow. Still photos are just that -- a single frame which can be broadcast in its entirety in one go. Equally, though, it can be artificially induced to broadcast using either UFF or LFF because it makes no difference how a still image is broadcast. So you can mix frame based video (slideshow) with *either* LFF *or* UFF video. It's just that you can't mix UFF and LFF together.

[sjj1805]

When it comes to mixing Upper Field first Video with Lower Field First Video you have to treat each case individually.

Technically you should not mix those field orders otherwise you will end up with jagged edges that are most noticeable with upright objects (lamp posts, telegraph poles, people etc) whilst either the object is moving or your camcorder is.

When you are aware of this pitfall you can of course experiment and in some circumstances you can "get away with it." I have mixed some Lower Field First video from my camcorder with some Upper field First video from my TV card. The times when you can most successfully get away with it are where
(in the video which has the incorrect field order)
1. Movement is towards or away from the camera rather than sideways.
2. Lighting is dark, such as late evening or at night - this helps mask any jaggedness.

You set your field order to that of whichever video is the most prominent.
For example - you have a 1 hour camcorder recording of your holiday and want to mix in a couple of minutes of some TV program or documentary about the location. Here you would use the field order for your camcorder - normally lower field first.

[alferber]

Since i upgraded to 11.5 my imported still images are very very poor quality. I opened up some old projects which had good quality images originally, and they too are bad. Doesn't matter what format (jpeg, bmp, tiff, etc.) -- all poor. All settings are as suggested in forum. Pictures load fine into Windows Movie Maker, but I do not want to go there unless I cannot get VideoStudio working....and I need it working by Thursday a.m! (I suppose I could revert back to older version and see if that helps.)

HEELLPP!!!

[Ron P.]

In the Preferences dialog window, on the Edit tab, what do you have set for your Resampling Quality, Good, Better or Best? For the best quality it should be set to best. I think the default setting is better.

[Clevo]

And don;t confuse what you see in the preview window to what the finished product is

[alferber]

Thanks for responding, Clevo and Vidoman.

The quality was set to "best." Prior to posting, I created a video file to see if in fact the preview window and storyline thumbnailes were just poor artifacts, but alas, the photo quality on the output was equally poor. Agian, prior to installing the Powerpack, images showed up just fine. After my post, I decided to go ahead and revert back to the post-PowerPack verson, and images (all jpeg) now import and show up fairly crisp, even though I had not yet changed the default setting for quality ("better") to "best" before checking to see if going back helped. My conclusion: either there is a defect in the PowerPack patch level, or something in it doesn't play nice with my system.

In the meantime, I am in good shape with the pre-patch version!

Thanks again for responding.