Still images Quality on DVD

tyanbe wrote on 11/24/2003, 1:02 PM
I want to produce the highest quality DVD slideshow of still images. I am using a Epson photo scanner and scanning at high quality .jpg format to produce higher resoluton that 720x480 ntsc. Photos look great on the screen and great when printed. I create slideshow in Screenblast Movie Studio from photos and burn to DVD and send to MyDVD. From there I burn to my Pioneer DVD 106 DVD burner. Then play on my RCA DVD player. Quality & colors are horrible. Each is very red and splotchy. I have tried DVD-R & DVD-RW in several different brands and get the same result. I have S-Video to TV. If you have any suggestions please help. I have invested quite a bit of money in all of this stuff and is so far very disappointed.

Comments

djcc wrote on 11/24/2003, 3:07 PM
FWIW, at least part of the problem will certainly be a function of resolution.... your computer monitor is capable of significantly greater resolution than your TV. For example, my monitor is set to a resolution of 1024 x 768. DVD is 720 x 480. Doing the math, my monitor's resolution has over twice the availble pixels/dots. Its also a fair bet the dot pitch on my monitor is tighter than my TV.... and finally, a function of size - a 36" TV will not look anywhere as clean as a much smaller computer monitor.

Definitely use the highest quality cable you can afford between your DVD player and your TV... it made a slight difference when I upgraded mine. My wife did not notice, but I did.... you might not notice the difference either.

Another recommendation is to use the least amount of JPG compression you can when scanning your images.... JPG artifacts seem to be more exaggerated when displayed on a TV.

As far as images being overly red, that could be a function of either your DVD player, or the TV.... but that should be obvious by comparison (ie, no other source material produces too much red).

Finally, are you outputting to AVI then letting MyDVD do the MPG2 encoding?
NaperRick wrote on 11/25/2003, 8:37 AM
I've done slideshows to DVD many times using MS3 and MyDVD and they have turned out fine. I use photos from my digital camera at 1760 X 1168 resolution and have also used scanned pictures with good results - the one thing I do though is use JPEG at it's best compression (lowest) which gives the highest quality. You may also have less artifacts if you convert image to .png before importing, though I never do that.
One thing to be aware of though is that, if your monitor is mis-adjusted and you adjust your scans to look good on your monitor, the color might be off significantly when output to a different device (like a TV). It is useful to get a color test pattern to adjust your monitor.
By the way - brands of blank DVD's shouldn't have any effect on color, etc of image.
NaperRick wrote on 11/25/2003, 8:56 AM
One thing I forgot to ask - have you tried to create a test DVD with one of the sample videos from the MS3 disk? They are on the MS3 disk in the /assets/video_clips/ directories. If the colors look OK on your TV but look bad on your computer monitor the problem might be with your monitor adjustment. Be sure you don't have any effects added in MS3 when you make your test DVD.