Thanks Jimmz for the reply. I have VMS 4.0 and I did not see a selection for the quality of the render under project properties. I did turn off the fast video resizing on the render. My problem seems to be lost of quality/clarity rather than flicker. Do you think that it will help if I import my stills in a format other than JPEG. This would be a lot of work but it would be worth it if it helps. Thanks again.

Billy

I've never used anything but jpeg and the pictures are outstanding.
Are you starting with a big enough picture? There is also a selection for better rendering in the advanced render section.



edit

I just launched vms4 and it is missing most of the tips I've given you. Sorry,
Maybe someone else can chime in

Can you describe what it is about the photos that doesn't look good?

If you are just saying that the still photos look "less detailed" than the original photos, that is unavoidable. Your finely detailed 6 MP still photos are being resampled to 0.3 MP resolution. NTSC DV video has a resolution of approx. 654x480 pixels, which comes out to about 0.314 megapixels. (MPEG2 for DVD is the same.)

If your photos basically look ok, but you are doing pans or zooms on them and they don't look so go, you may see a marked improvement in video quality, and a significant reduction in rendering time, if you resample them yourself down to something closer to DV resolution before you bring them into VMS. Use some other application, like PhotoShop, or the free Irfanview program you can find on the web, to resize your photos to something closer to 654x480. If you are zooming in on them, you'll want them a bit bigger (900x600 or similar) so that after you've zoomed in you still have an image size of 654x480.

Tim L

Thanks Tim,I guess what I am saying is the stiils look less detailed/resolution like you said. I'm sure this is due to the resamplelization(is this a word) as you said. There is some flicker mainly on the red colors, but since I have VMS 4.0 there is not much I can do with this.

I am not doing pans or zooms. Do you think that it would help the quality to resize the stills closer to DV resolution anyhow? I checked the size of a couple of the stills using Photoshop and they were 3072x2048. I'm sure that it would reduce the rendering time but would it improve the quality?If so I'm not sure I understand why. Thanks again for your help.

Billy

If you aren't doing any pans or zooms on the photos, I'm guessing that resizing them before bringing them into VMS would not have any effect other than reducing rendering time, and improving your preview performance while editing. (With big photos on the timeline, I often get a noticeable lag before the photo appears while previewing my video project, or when VMS loads the next set of timeline thumbnails when scrolling over to the next section of timeline.)

If you end up doing pans and zooms, however, (and doing so can make a slideshow a lot more interesting...), then resizing the photos can help quite a bit with appearance. When zooming in on big, high-resolution photos, sometimes you get little, flickery artifacts on shiny objects or on bright edges of objects, etc. Many people wouldn't even notice, but I found it quite distracting.

I had a post about this quite some time ago:
Still Photo Sizes, Good vs Best Render
However, the files that I had uploaded to "savefile.com" for that post have long since evaporated due to lack of interest. (They vanish if nobody accesses the file for 30 days or something like that.)

My goal for that test was to evaluate the "Good" vs "Best" render setting, and to investigate whether resampling the photos to lower resolution before bringing them into VMS helped. This may make little sense without seeing the video samples from my test, but here are some excerpts of my conclusions at that time:

Great information Tim . Thank you very much for your time. Guys like you make this a great forum.

Billy