Slideshow Issue

ipschoser1 wrote on 1/22/2008, 5:39 PM

Some of my still photos appear to "crawl" or pixelate during animated playback. It's interesting that not all of the photos do this and even with "problem" photos the issue sometimes is corrected by taking the photo out of the slideshow and reinserting it. I've seen this problem occur in other programs when Jpegs are put on DVD, but to a much lesser extent than what I'm experiencing with Movie Studio. Can someone help me find a solution? Thanks.

Comments

menopausal wrote on 1/22/2008, 8:09 PM

I don't know if this will make any difference, but I use PNG for photos.

ipschoser1 wrote on 1/23/2008, 6:39 AM

Thanks. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that my photo editing software is capable of converting the camera's RAW files to PNG...

Tim L wrote on 1/23/2008, 10:28 AM

Three things can help.

1. Right click on the photo, select switches, then tick the "Reduce Interlace Flicker" setting. This will improve things if you are viewing on an interlaced (crt) TV.

2. If you are doing any panning or zooming on the photo (i.e. any motion), you can get much better results by resampling the photo (outside of VMS) to a much lower resolution. DV video is only about a 0.3 MP image -- about 654x480 in square pixel format. If you reduce your photos to something like 1200x800 (or whatever the real pixels work out to) you may see much improved results.

3. Set your render quality to "Best". This improves the pixel sampling algorithm inside VMS, but at the expense of significantly increased render times.

Item #2 above -- resizing your photos -- seems like a big nuisance, but there are free programs (Irfanview, etc) that can do this for you for a bunch of files at once, and you'll also find VMS to be a little bit zippier while editing, as it is now working with much smaller files when creating thumbnails and doing real-time preview, etc.

Tim L

ipschoser1 wrote on 1/23/2008, 7:24 PM

Thanks Tim! Could you recommend a dpi setting on the jpegs going into VMS? Right now they are set at 96dpi.

Tim L wrote on 1/23/2008, 8:47 PM

DPI doesn't matter (to Vegas).

You could have a 1200 pixel wide photo set for 96 dpi, which would make it a 12.5" wide print, and you could have another 1200 pixel wide photo set for 1200 dpi, and it would be a 1" wide print. But Vegas just sees it as 1200 pixels wide, and will (generally) fill the screen with it, depending on how much you might zoom in or out using pan crop or track motion.

To resize your photos, consider how much you might zoom in on them. As long as the photo is at least 654* pixels wide and at least 480 pixels high (for NTSC), you can fill the screen with it. If you are going to zoom in, then your photo needs to be bigger so that your zoomed-in section is at least 654x480. So 1000 - 1200 pixels wide is generally good unless you are going to zoom in a lot.

*Edit: Well, actually, std def DV or MPEG is 720 pixels wide (non-square pixels), so I guess it would be best to have a photo at least 720 pixels wide to fill the screen.

Tim L