Graphic Stills

vannest wrote on 5/19/2006, 6:53 AM
I'm trying to figure out the best and easiest way to insert a PIP of a map into a video. I can work the PIP part ok. It's the image I'm having trouble with.

Here's how I've been doing it:

1. Use MS Streets and Trips to get the area.
2. Copy the area on the MS Streets to Paint Shop Pro
3. Resize it to larger or smaller or the same (I've tried all different ways)
4. Save image as JPG
5. Go to Movie Studio and do the PIP thingie.

The problem is that I can NOT get an image that looks half decent on a tv screen. It's either blurred something horrid or has so many jaggies it's ridiculous.

Can someone give me some hints as to what to do? Is JPG right? Should it be PNG? GIF? BMP?

I just want a fricking map to show an area the narrator is talking about.

Thanks

Pamela

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 5/19/2006, 8:44 AM
What you're doing is ok and i can't think of any different steps that would result in anything better. The problem is that the resolution of a TV is abysmally low. You've only got 480 lines in the image and a typical television that's 20" tall would result in only 24 lines per inch. My first dot-matrix printer was 72 dpi and that looked pretty bad. Add in the fact that your PIP image is smaller than full screen and you end up with a mess. If your PIP is 1/3 the screen dimensions then you only have about 240x160 pixels. Try resizing your map to that size in PhotoShop and you'll see it looks pretty bad there too.

Use an image with as little detail as possible. Large bold lines work much better than thinner details. Adding a little bit of blur or soften to the image will help cover up the jaggies.
Paul Mead wrote on 5/19/2006, 10:25 AM
Here are some thoughts from someone who thinks he understands how this stuff works, but really doesn't, so take it with a dose of skepticism...

What are the actual dimensions of the orginal JPEG? I suspect what you really want to do is size the PIP so that VMS will attempt to use close to the same number of video pixels to represent the image. Otherwise the render engine will be interpolating too many pixels to come up with an approximation of the original image, resulting in a fuzzy image. On the other hand, since the aspect ratio for a video pixel is different from the aspect ratio of a JPEG pixel it may end up fuzzy anyway.

You may also want to try using the "best" setting for rendering to see if the extra effort can sharpen the result.

Of course, ideally, if you can get the original image to have more resolution then the resulting video will look better too. If you can find a way to get whatever mapping package you are using to give you a bigger image then that would be best.

fwiw,