Pictures become distorted when rendering to MPEG

rllagas wrote on 7/26/2003, 7:05 AM
I rendered picture slideshow in MPEG1 and burned it to VCD but the outcome seems to be not so nice.
The pictures were taken from 4Megapixel camera....so its around 2500x17200...(cant remember the exact pixel).

The problem is.... when i played it on media player and on VCD player... small objects like some parts of the face (eyes and nose)of the person in picture was distorted...

close up pictures are OK....

My questions?
1. Do i need to resize the pictures?
2. What sould be the best setting for rendering picture slideshow at MPEG1
I had rendered it at default settings for PAL VCD.
3. Can i render it to MPEG2 and burn it in VCD?

any help is very much appreciated.

Rommel

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/26/2003, 7:41 AM
1. PAL VCD frame size is 352x288 pixels no matter what size the original images are. If you change this it won't be a VCD anymore and it may not be compatible with various players anymore.

2. Using a higher bitrate and moving the quality slider all the way to the right will help produce fewer artifacts.

3. No. You can render in MPEG2 and create an SVCD at 480x576 pixels, or create a DVD at 720x576 pixels. In the case of SVCD beware that it may not be compatible with many DVD players. In the case of DVD, you'll need a DVD burner and blank DVDs to create the disc. One other option is to create a DVD that is less than 700MB and burn the resulting directories and files to a CD to create a MiniDVD, but even this may have some incompatibilites.

Bottom line thing to remember is that video is low resolution. Even DVD quality 720x576 is much much less than your original pictures.
mikkie wrote on 7/26/2003, 9:48 AM
I'd say to check out the guides at doom9.org, dvdrhelp.com, and perhaps digital-digest.com.

RE: picture size, either Vegas can resize them for you, or do it first in an imaged editor. As Kelly points out, a PAL vcd is going to be 352 x 288, so either set your project for this, or double - going to a smaller frame size, you can *sometimes* get a better compressed result if you provide more data for the encoder to pick and choose from. Why double? Software likes doing things at 50% much better then something arbitrary.

RE: settings, try the guides... otherwise experiment with the settings. The default setup looks for and is designed for in frame motion, which you don't have a lot of in most slide shows - other settings might benefit directly, or might just allow you to use more bandwidth which almost always helps quality.

RE: mpg2... again the links above. Try varients of the VCD spec to see what your VCD player will handle (dvdrhelp has some test CD images you can try, but not all varieties if I remember correctly). The spec itself locks you into mpg1.

RE: your main prob, perhaps the pictures themselves just won't display well on your TV? It is a different animal then your PC monitor, with different characteristics. Might try some blur or other filters/fx including those for color clamping (reducing the range of the colors to match your TV). Might even have to fade things, reducing color saturation. Best suggestion is to post a couple of still if possible and post a link here so we can take a look at what's going on.
BillyBoy wrote on 7/26/2003, 10:42 AM
The way I read it, the original poster is a little disappointed with the quality difference between a 4 Meg/pixel camera still and how it looks converted to DV. There is simply no way you can get that many pixels into a typical sized video frame. So sure, you'll lose some detail.