Using pictures in my video...bad quality.

[Ken Berry]

Though it is probably unrelated, I am still interested in why ftloghm's project has 'Upper Field First'. He/she has not indicated what the source of the video -- as opposed to the still photos -- was. If it was from an analogue source, I would of course understand. But if it is digital (DV/AVI) then it would normally have been captured Lower Field First and the project properties would need to reflect that...

[mell]

I work extensively with UVS9 and JPEG images.

Like MikeGunter's suggestion, I would recommend pre-sizing the image resolution down to your video resolution prior to use (for JPEG; the other posts seem to indicate no probs with BMP & TIFFs).

I'd resize all JPEG still images to 720x576 (480 in yr case), enhance their contrast, colours, etc. in an image editor prior to insertion in UVS9. They all consistently gets rendered Perfectly!

I know the extra step's a pain, but it works ALL the time.

Hope this helps.

Mell

[maddrummer3301]

I've gotten much better results using "Frame-Based" for pictures.
But, you can't mix a frame-based video with an interlaced video
without having the original problem because the frame-based mpg2
file will be converted to interlaced so
the pictures would be better off as a seperate menu item.

When you make a "Slide-Show" using MovieFactory they come out
nice. If you import the mpg2 file that MF created it displays "Frame-Based".

MD

[daniel]

I know I'm not helping but FWIW I use JPG (as well as TIF and BMP) pictures of all sizes regularly in VS8 and VS9 and they always come out sharp and clean, even when paused and enlarged on the TV via the DVD player... Baseline OR overlaid, field-based.
At 7000 and higher they're nearly perfect.

So it's not a hardcoded problem within VS but a production settings issue.

Just be sure they are 24 bit and not 256 colors, that comes out horrible after compression to 0-235.
Blocks are usually badly encoded MPG compression. Are you sure you don't spoil it by re-encoding when making the DVD?

[jbowen28]

In response to daniel. An MPEG2 file is created prior to burning to DVD as indicated in the "Read me first" message at the top of this forum. So I assume the jpg photos are re-encoded to MPEG2.

[kebrinton]

For me recently the hassle has been to remember to switch between "Fit to Project" and "Keep Aspect Ratio" when putting stills into the video stream. Old 35mm photos behave differently from digital .JPEGs. Not to mention stills "saved as digital images" from the video itself. When I get it wrong, I can either go back and do it the other way, or use Photoshop to add 9% to the height or width, whichever needs it.

[jbowen28]

According to Ulead tech support, VS cannot convert high resolution stills (jpg photos) to DV format (720x480) very well. Thus the blurry result. They suggested that I downsize my jpg photos to 720x480 pixels. Any format (bmp, jpg, png, etc) is OK so long as it is 720x480 pixels.