Premiere Elements 3 playback quality

[steven]

I don't know if it's my computer or what but when I playback a video project after rendering, the pictures look grainy. Even after adjusting from fit to manification 100%. Can someone help me on why it does this. I have not burned to DVD yet to see how it looks on a flat panel as i'm still working on the project. My fear is that it will look the same on the DVD. Pictures range from 1MP to 3MP
will exporting to AVI or to MPEG help? ... Thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
I have a quad pro, 4gig Ram, ATI saph. 1 gig video card.

[Steve Grisetti]

This may be a better question for our Premiere Elements forum rather than that Water Cooler, Steven -- but no matter. I'm sure you'll get responses here. (I can, of course, move this thread too if you'd like.)

First, where are you judging this graininess? Are you judging it by looking at the playback in the Premiere Elements Monitor or by outputting it to a file and looking at the file? It makes a big difference -- and the Monitor may not be the best place to judge.

Your photo sizes will make no difference, since anything you put into Premiere Elements 3 is going to come out at video resolution (essentially 640x480) or less. So, if by graininess, you mean that the video isn't as high resolution as your original photos -- that is pretty much the nature of the format.

What is your ultimate goal? If you're going to output a DVD to play on a standard TV, then video resolution will look just fine, once you output it and play it on a TV. (In fact, it will even look great if you play it on a big-screen TV, if your DVD or discs player includes an upshift feature!)

But, if you want to keep the original resolution and definition of the photos and you want to display it on a computer monitor (which is many times the resolution of video), then you may want to consider another program. Pro Show Gold, for instance, is a slideshow creator that outputs slideshows for playback on a computer that look virtually as clear and as clean as the original photos!

But, if you plan to output a video of any kind -- for DVD, for the web or even for viewing on a computer -- it's only essentially 640x480 pixels by its nature. You can't improve that without going to hi-def video and BluRay discs -- and a newer version of Premiere Elements.