Hi, Found this forum active and participants seem to have a number of experts. I hope to be able to get some good suggestions/answers here. I have tried many searches and posts. I am new in video editing. I have so far made only 3 videos (VCD) - slideshows from photos. The photos are from digitail camera, or scanned. They look crispy clear on computer; they are high resolutions. I then uses video editing software to create the video (VCD) slideshows and adding sound tracks - tried ShowBiz, Premier, Ulead Video Studio. The outcome - picture quality no good (I think what the experts called pixelation?); no good whether played on computer or TV. All three software gave the same result. Sound is good. Obviously, my source is not a problem - digital photos at high resolution. I thought Premier is a top software. I can't figure out why? I have also tried to scale the photo to resolution of VCD (3??x2??) and also tried to scale them to (720x2??) (sorry, can't remember the numbers off my head) - whatever resolution of the pictures I use - same outcome. I would appreciate any help/guidance in this aspect. Thanks & Regards Hong

-- W H Ong (owh_bn@yahoo.co.uk), May 06, 2004

Answers

You're going to lose a lot of quality resizing a high-resolution image and compressing it to mpeg-1, so a lot of what you're seeing is unavoidable. You might try checking the bitrate of the output files. Video CD should be (ideally) 1150Kbps, with a max of 2400Kbps.

When you rescaled the image manually, did it look pixellated then, or just blurry?

-- Bryan (gryps-innocens@gryphon.zzn.com), May 07, 2004.

Hi Bryan, Thanks a lot for responding. When I scaled the images down, the images still look sharp on computer. However, once converted to MPEG-1 and VCD, they are not clear (I did try MPEG-2 and SVCD, I think, with not much improvement seen). I think it's blurr. The faces in the group photos are not clear. This result is the same whether I use the high resolution images in the video editing software, or the scaled images in the video editing software. This problem has bothered me almost two years and I do not have any place to find the answer - looked at vcdhelp (and posted there), everywhere on the net, etc, etc (may be I just don't have enough basic knowledge to pick up the right stuff?). I have a wedding VCD slideshow made by photo studio in Taiwan, and the photos are very clear (what I considered VHS) when played on TV. I am sure they also use digital images scanned from my wedding photos or negatives. But I just can't match their quality when I do my own version. I have used very high resolution images, as well as various resolutions - without noticing any improvement. I am sure is not the source. Is definitely my tool and process are wrong. But I just don't know where. I am using Compaq EVO PIII 1.2GHz and 512MB - I think this hardware is not a problem (to handle just a slideshow). I have tried Showbiz, Premiere, Ulead Video Studio: all same result. May be of the codec(?) in my computer? What I did was: 1. Scan the photos/ Download from digital camera - all very high resolution (very clear on computer, even when zoom in). JPEG files. 2. Import them into the video editing software - using their PAL VCD template (so think it is a standard and there is no setting I can change). 3. Arrage the photos in the story board, add transitions, add sound tracks. 4. Use the video editing software to render/export into MPEG-1 as well as burning to VCD. (There is no provision to select codec(?) in this stage) I also tried to burn the MPEG-1 to VCD using Nero Burn. Where can I change to improve the quality? Thanks a gain. Regards, Hong

-- W H Ong (owh_bn@yahoo.co.uk), May 07, 2004.

The only other thing I can think of right off hand is that the video authoring program is using a poor resizing method, like "nearest neighbor," which gives a bad looking picture. If you can choose the resizing method somewhere, pick something like Bicubic or Lanczos. Not sure where that would be in your programs.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with the commercial video editors, seeing as how Premier hates my computer with a passion. I'm going to try a few things on this end, and let you know.

-- Bryan (gryps-innocens@gryphon.zzn.com), May 07, 2004.

I'm going to send you three pictures that I converted into mpg stills using VCDEasy. If you can, take a look at them and see if they are better or worse than what you are seeing. We'll work from there.

-- Bryan (gryps-innocens@gryphon.zzn.com), May 07, 2004.

This could be down to what encoder (and its settings) is being used to convert to VCD MPEG-1. I don't know about ShowBiz; Ulead VideoStudio uses Ligos and Premiere 6.5 above uses MainConcept. These are the built-in MPEG encoding engines of said NLE programs; MPEG encoding is a separate and distinct area from video editing. You don't just say 'I created an MPEG stream with VideoStudio'; it's just as important to know what VideoStudio's built-in MPEG encoder is (so it can be tweaked, loved, or detested, the latter being the case for a long time with the very poor wretched puked-out quality of Ligos which came with VS ver 4,5,6 (?)). The MPEG encoder will influence the quality of the resulting video greatly, so best to export 1st to an AVI file (instead of directly to MPEG), then take that AVI file as input to TMPGEnc (MPEG-1 is free, www.tmpgenc.net) and encode using VCD template. TMPGEnc is known for creating better-quality MPEGs than its Ligos and MainConcept rivals. But why stop here? If you have any aspirations at all for creating these slideshows make DVDs instead. Sneakily enough Ligos is NOT that much better creating MPEG-2 streams for DVD; the higher data rates involved just minimizes the pixelation.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), May 11, 2004.

Hi Mehmet, Thanks a lot for responding. Showbiz does not allow me to select the codec for MPEG, and I am not sure what codec they use. It does allow me to save as AVI and choose the codec. I will give that a try. What AVI codec do you use? I have in the list Huffyuv 2.1.1, DivX 5.1.1, Indeo Video R3/4.5/5.1, Cinepak, MS video 1, Intel IYUV and even 'none'. Should I use 720x480? Is the audio compression important: PCM, DV audio, CCITT, ADPCM, WM Speech encoder ? Regards, Hong

-- W H Ong (owh_bn@yahoo.co.uk), May 15, 2004.

Guys, did you guys try to use the program called "ilife"? It is amazing program that I have seem to make slide show. However, it only applies on the Mac. If you guys found out what program can make the better slide show, please let me know. thanks

-- fion (fioncchan@hotmail.com), June 21, 2004.

Ulead DVD Picture show 2 I use that and I make the most excellent slideshows. People love them. I can go even further to use ULEAD DVD movie maker Which I can do even more transition effects and it keeps the same quality for me.

Yet if you want to go "EXTREME" and have the time. You can always export to AVI FILE using high bit rates then send your AVI file into Tmpgenc and use The sharpen and noise filters plus load up the KVCD template and set it to work in batch mode and when done you will have a nice Sharp VCD slideshow or movie.

-- todd (tandyymanx@sbcglobal.net), December 17, 2004.

For burning digital photographs into VCD, nothing beats Ulead DVD picture show 3.

First: One must not use the transition or the panning options, both deteriorate the picture quality. With these option on, the video files increase tremendously. It is very nice but the quality is poor.

Second: Before importing, I suggest that you reduce the size of your digital pictures to 1024x768 (or any similar rates) (use PS) into a folder for all pictures. Don't touch your originals. The program will encode your reduced-size pictures more quickly and efficiently. and it will automatically put them into one folder. You repeat this for other folders. You can combine folder or add more for each folder. Each folder is menu and can be renamed.

Third: For each folder you can choose the music or songs you want to accompany the pictures. You can timed the pictures (3 seconds or more). This will not increase the length of the video for the VCD.

Fourth: the VCD will have a menu-driven and play easily on VCD or DVD players. You can be ensure of the quality.

Good Luck.

woo

-- woo (wookumwah@hotmail.com), January 17, 2005.