best settings for a picture montage?

[BumpSkillz]

Hi... I'm using Premiere 7.0, and can not get the right settings to make a movie out of scanned still pictures. I'm trying to make a family picture montage with music, but all the video so far (avi, divx) show a drastic drop in the still quality.

I want to play this montage to my family on a projector screen, and also make a DVD for TV usage. What settings would be best for such a montage? I want to retain the high quality of the pictures, that's my main concern. Thanks!

 

[LRSmith]

What are your project settings?

Also, what resolution are you scanning your pictures? If you are scanning them in at a low resolution, and then asking for a higher resolution within premiere, you will lose picture quality.

 

[dlviolin]

BunpSkillz,
I have successfully produced two programs using stills and narration with music accomp. Most of my images were scanned photos or slides. The resolution was usually around 1000 x 750, some more some less. I was careful to edit them first in Photoshop and crop using the constrained aspect ratio of 4x3. I was able to add motion giving a zoom effect with only some degradation...usually in the form of slight jiggle to the output image...it looked ok on the preview pane, but the output to the vcr was a little jiggly. I expect that I needed to scan that image at a greater resolution.
I exported to avi, but that wasn't too successful...much better just running the VCR while pressing enter. The images were rock solid and clear as a bell. Next hurdle is buring to DVD. Haven't gotten the burner yet, so don't know what to tell you about that.
What kinds of problems are you encountering?
Hope we can help you...this shouldn't be any problem. I didn't use any special "settings" in the program itself.
Dan
Premier 6.0
DV500 Plus

 

[BumpSkillz]

Hey, thanks for the quick replies guys!
Well, what I will be doing with the video is exporting it as some kind of video file (avi, divx) and then burning it to DVD. After that, the DVD will be played in a DVD player on a projector and onto a screen. It will also be played to a television set. Avi videos don't work too well for stills. And the Divx didn' either. I'm thinking maybe the settings I used for the stills (optimize stills? specific codec?) may have made them look bad. The problem really is that the pictures don't keep their high resolution... Instead, the codec seems to blur them a bit. However, I must say, the resolution of pictures scanned was lower than the video resolution size... hmmmmmmm. Maybe I'll rescan at 1000xwhatever and then bring the ratio to 4:3 like you said and try that.

By the way, what tool did you use in photoshop to crop it to 4:3 automatically/easily?

 

[LRSmith]

I think you'll find much better results if you scan your pictures at a higher quality (at least the resolution of your video). By scanning in at a low resolution, and then asking for a high resolution, some interpolation in the pixels must occur---result is a fuzzy, pixelated picture.

It is always easier to drop information (pixels), but it's much harder to insert information (pixels).

 

[dlviolin]

Hello Bump,
In Photoshop, go to Window>show navigator (if the navigator box isn't already showing). In the navigator box, there is a tab called options. Click it and in style, choose "constrained aspect ratio", then put 4 in width and 3 in height. When you select a portion of the image it will automatically draw a 4x3 box.
You don't have to specify the pixels...Premier will automatically fill the screen with the image unless it is too small.
Another thing...I have found that you will almost always lose the edges of your image when it is displayed on the TV, so either leave extra image when you crop, or enlarge your canvas and add a black band around the image. Either way works. Just making the image smaller won't work as Premier will just fill the frame with whatever you give it.
BTW, find the thread here that talks about using a plug in to export directly to your DVD software.

From a thread called "Exporting to DVD from Prem 6.0 - revisited",
Here's a snip:
"WizyWyg (TechnicalUser) Jan 26, 2004
this was posted about a week ago, in a thread about this :

robmcl (Instructor) Jan 21, 2004
Hi folks...just found this discussion and thought I'd add some of my own experience...fwiw...
I also prefer TMPGEnc for encoding (best quality I've found) and yes, it normally needs an uncompressed AVI (which I used to export from Premiere).
I have recently found a product/method called "frame serving". There are several products that perform this function as a Premiere plug-in. Basically, you "export" your timeline to this plug-in, then start up your TMPGEnc. The plug-in will literally "serve" each frame of your timeline from Premiere directly to TMPGEnc (hence the term "frame serving&quot. This completely eliminates the time (and disk space) req'd to export an uncompresssed AVI before encoding to MPEG. It does work...and very well!!
There are several products, but the one I like (and now use all the time) is called PluginPac FrameServer by debugmode.com

http://www.debugmode.com/pluginpac/frameserver.php

Give it a try...you'll like it
Rob"
I can't wait to try this out!
Dan
Premier 6.0
Pinnacle DV500Plus

 

[robmcl]

Since the topic here is photo montage, and the subject of editing pic using Photoshop was included, I thought I'd just add some info I've found very helpful. For me, this has eliminated the extra step of editing every pic in Photoshop (since that was primarily for "size" or to avoid pic being "stretched&quot....

- import your still shots to the project window

option #1
- select all picture files
- select Project > Automate to Timeline

option #2 (preferred)
- select File > New > Storyboard
- drag and drop all files into the Storyboard window
- re-arrange still in prefered order (I love this feature!!)
- select the Automate to Timeline icon in the lower right of the Storyboard window

continue from either #1 or #2
- highlight all clips now on the timeline (this is an important step)
- select Video > Maintain Aspect Ratio (this keeps the size from being stretched in either direction)
- select Video > Aspect Fill Color to choose a different color to fill-in the background where some pictures don't fill the frame.

I've done many "photo montage" projects this way and it's a huge timesaver compared to editing every photo file.
Hope this helps.....Rob

 

[BumpSkillz]

Thanks guys, you don't know how much you've helped.
A friend gave me a disc for ULEAD DVD PictureShow2, and I tried it to see how it is. While not as customizable as usign Premiere, it still does the job for a montage and actually does have a lot of good features.

There's one thing I notice though, whether using PictureShow2 or Premiere... When a still has too many small color area that are different colors, such as trees in the distance or a small person whose color pixels are obviously small and close together, the picture "twitches" on a TV screen. It actually flickers, and doesn't look so nice.

Here's what I think, you tell me what you think. I think that because TV resolution is lower than the resolution of the pictures I used, that pictures that are too detailed flicker. I have all my pictures scanned at 1024x768. Once I make the montage, I burn it to DVD, and play it on a TV. From what I see, a PC screen doesn't flicker with those few pictures, but the TV does. Can I fix it by dropping the resolution?

 

[BumpSkillz]

Let me correct something... It flickers on my PC screen as well. What's up with that?