Stills are looking bad

TomG wrote on 3/28/2009, 11:03 PM
I'm stuck on what to do....

I am creating a 15 min project and it consists of all stills. These are just pictures that have been taken over the past 30 years. Most of them look pretty good but some are giving me fits.

The problem is that the pictures look great on my computer monitor (18") but when I create a DVD and show it on a projection TV (52"), some pictures look pretty bad. Eventually this project will be shown on a 12' x 25' screen in a small theatre which has me even more worried.

All pictures were processed through CS4 and converted to .png format. I have often read that Vegas works best with the .png format. I am rendering to the Architect NTSC DVD video stream template using best. I even tried changing one of the pictures to the original .bmp format and that didn't help.

The pictures that are giving me fits are older photos. On the big screen they look grainy and the colors look bad compared to the smaller screen.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated since this is for my son's wedding at the end of May.

Thanks in advance,

TomG

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 3/28/2009, 11:14 PM
You didn't mention the two most critical factors about your originals:
1) Are the originals digitals or scans of photographic prints?
2) What are the pixel dimensions of your originals?

If your originals are scans or they are below DVD resolution, they are going to look like crap. No way you can get around it.

Are you doing any cropping or enlarging in Vegas? If so, are you using Event Pan/Crop or Track Motion?

"The pictures that are giving me fits are older photos."

Care to post an example somewhere?
TomG wrote on 3/29/2009, 5:39 AM
Most of my pictures are scanned prints. But the pictures that look bad on the DVD are around 300 x 216. Maybe I need to rescan these pictures?

I also am using track motion.

Is it possible to use blending in CS4 to improve the image quality on the DVD?

I don't have an easy way to post the image.

Thanks,

TomG
rs170a wrote on 3/29/2009, 6:07 AM
NTSC SD resolution is 720 x 480.
Your 300 x 216 images look bad because they have to be enlarged more than 2X to that resolution.
Rescan them to at least NTSC res and they'll look much better.
My scanning "rule of thumb" is that, at 100 dpi, 1" of image = 100 pixels.
If it's a 6" x 4" image, I scan at 150 dpi which gives me a 900 x 600 pixel image.
As long as deep zooms aren't required, this is more than sufficient.
One other thing to do is to render using Best mode as this will help maintain image quality for the MPEG-2 encode.

edit: unless you have a specific reason for using Track Motion, use Pan/Crop instead.
It will give you better image quality as it doesn't reduce the image to project size like Track Motion does.

Mike
TomG wrote on 3/29/2009, 8:09 AM
Thanks, Mike

I appreciate the rule of thumb. All the "bad" pictures (fortunately there is only 7) are 300 x 241. I need to locate these prints and rescan at higher res.

Appreciate the rule of thumb. I was going to ask what are the minimums are for digital and that answers that question.

The reason for using so much track motion is that I have many montages of 2, 3, or 4 pictures. Don't think pan/crop will allow me to position the pictures in the manner I want. Combining each picture on 4 tracks and track motioning them into position. Am I losing significant quality in doing this? Also, I am using Best in my rendering.

TomG
Laurence wrote on 3/29/2009, 8:18 AM
There have been times when you simply don't have access to high enough resolution scans of pictures you need to use. When that is the case, an uprezzing still program can really get you out of a bind. I use this one:

http://www.benvista.com/main/content/content.php?page=ourproducts&section=photozoompro_1
rs170a wrote on 3/29/2009, 8:22 AM
TomG, if you're not doing any zooming, then TM is fine.

I do a grad video for my kids' grade school in which the opening sequence is at least 3 tracks and I always use Pan/Crop for positioning and moving of the images.

There's nothing wrong with using Track Motion as long as you understand that it automatically shrinks all material down to project resolution.
This means that, if you have an image from a digital still camera that's 2000 x 1600 pixels, TM reduces this to 720 x 480 (assuming this is what you 're working with).
Therefore, any zooms are done at this reduced resolution, resulting in image degradation.

Mike
musicvid10 wrote on 3/29/2009, 8:32 AM
To reiterate what others have said:

1) Scan at a higher resolution like 1800 X ?. They should be larger than 720 X 480 if you will be doing any crop / enlarge at all.

2) Use Event Pan / Crop rather than track motion. Doing so will preserve the full resolution of your stills (up to 100%). It should be possible to do anything in Event Pan / Crop that you can do with Track Motion, except some of the controls act oppositely.
Zelkien69 wrote on 3/29/2009, 8:52 AM
You may also want to add a Gaussian blur with a .002H and .002 for the amount. These seems to help smooth creases and odd patterns in clothes.
Stringer wrote on 3/29/2009, 9:24 AM
Another option is to film the photos with your video camera ..
TomG wrote on 3/29/2009, 9:43 AM
Thanks again to everyone for the ideas... I think you saved my bacon on this one.

And I never even thought about using pan/crop to just position objects... that is only if you don't want to crop it first and then position it.

One last question about TM. Is it correct that you are either using TM or not using TM on a track? You can't start and stop it on the same track, can you?

TomG
rs170a wrote on 3/29/2009, 10:41 AM
I generally use Pan/Crop to position images, not crop them.

You can use keyframes in Track Motion to "enable/disable" it.

Mike
gpsmikey wrote on 3/29/2009, 9:45 PM
Another consideration is to use a program like Photodex Producer (designed to create slide shows) to build your slide show - it actually works very well for that. When you have the show done, all your captions etc in place, then you render the output to uncompressed avi which Vegas handles very well - add a few more touches in vegas and burn a DVD from that. Actually works quite well and gives good results with stills (after you re-scan them to at least the number of pixels you are trying to display on the screen that is). I use both Producer and Vegas together quite often - they make a very good pair of applications.

mikey