What do you have the preview quality set to?

Just above your preview window is a selection list for preview quality. I think your choices are something like "xxxx", "xxxx", good", and "best", with "Auto" and "Full" options for each. (I can't remember the first two, but they are lower quality settings, like "draft" or something.)

With the "Auto" option, the preview image will automatically be scaled down to fit into whatever size preview window you make (by stretching or shrinking the preview window). With "Full", the software is trying to create a full 720x480 (NTSC) image, but you might only see a little corner of it if your window is too small.

I find that on stills, even the "Good" setting often makes them look terrible. Only the "Best" setting works well. However, using "Best" can requires a lot of processing power, so playing video with stills back on "Best" mode might look best, but might make transitions and effects stutter or look bad.

Also, I think there is a button in the upper left part of the preview window that calls up the project settings, and lets you specify a quality setting of some kind for the project or for rendering or something. (Sorry, I'm not at a computer with VMS installed.) I think the instructions indicate that enabling the higher quality will slow rendering down significantly, but this high quality setting helps give better-looking results on any image that is rescaled from its original size -- like a digital photo that is bigger than 655x480 pixels (ie square pixel version of 720x480) and has to be scaled down for video. I think this also is suposed to help if you do any crop/pan operations, like zooming in or out on video or on stills.

(By the way, burning a 50c DVD just to try things out is a lot cheaper than buying more memory...)

Tim L