Export quality issue

[PAPatFan]

Hi All-

Hoping someone can help me out because this is driving me nuts. I recently upgraded to PE8 from PE4 and am having significant issues with the quality of my exports both AVI and burned to DVD. The quality of my stills is very poor (it almost looks like the horizontal lines are doubling over each other?). I re-created the project on both PE4 and separately on PE8 and the 4 version comes out fine. I have also tried this across two different systems with two different OS's so I have ruled out the hardware.

Is there something about the PE 8 export settings I am missing? Any ideas on what migth be causing this? Does version 8 have trouble handling stills (I even lowered the resolution to see if it was rendering problem with no luck)?

It might also be worth mentioning that just for testing I used the YouTube preset and uploaded the video directly there and it looks great. Ultimately, I would like to use Vimeo but can't get a good export for upload.

Any help would be appreciated!

Frank

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Frank,
Sorry to say that version 8 was a disaster and we never had much good to say about it.
Most of the problems in version 8 were fixed in version 9. My suggestion is to stick with version 4.

But for purposes of trying to help you through this, what is the project setting that you are using and what are the size of your still images?

[PAPatFan]

Chuck,

Thanks for the speedy reply! After toying around and reading some of the stuff on the MuviPix site (which is GREAT by the way) I am realizing 8 is probably not the best version.

My project settings are DV Widescreen and I am using just jpg's. I did uncheck the scale to fit frame option and that didn't seem to help much. My originals are very high resolution at 4752x3168. I followed some advice on this form and resized to 1000x667 and I think the effect I am seeing is even worse. It is especially noticeable during pans and zooms.

It's kind of like a shimmering effect and has what I described above to be almost a doubling and overlapping of horizontal lines. I have tried all of my tricks form the past including different variations of the field options and reverse field dominance. The originals were shot on a Canon T1i.

Frank

[Steve Grisetti]

Try right-clicking on each photo and selecting Field Options and then, on the options panel, checking Flicker Removal.

And don't forget to render your timeline before you play back your slides! (Press Enter and the red lines above the clips will turn green.) This will give you a much better idea of what your final output will look like.

[PAPatFan]

Steve,

I had tried flicker removal and it helped with the shimmering effect but the resolution issue is still there. Did they change the ccodecs between versions? Again, the direct to YouTube export is miles better,

I haven't been rendering the timeline as I have just been doing exports to finished files. The timeline render is just for preview - correct?

Frank

[Chuck Engels]

You can also right click on the images and select Field Options and Deinterlace, that may help.
Still, if version 4 is working correctly and version 8 isn't that says something.

What are you watching the video with after exporting the AVI? What is your resolution setting on your monitor?

[Steve Grisetti]

And meantime, don't forget that you ARE looking at video resolution -- the equivalent of a 640x480 pixel image -- so it's not going to be nearly the resolution of your original photos. It's just the nature of video.

How do you plan to deliver this slideshow? If you're going to play it on a computer, there are other programs (like ProShow Gold) that can produce much higher quality slideshows.

But if you want it on video or DVD because you plan to show it on TV, it's either this lower resolution or a BluRay disc and hi-def TV.

How and where do you plan to show it?

[PAPatFan]

Steve and Chuck,

I re-created two new projects with new media on each version (4 & 8) and they look identical. I think my eyes were playing tricks on me before!

I think I have settled on the issue being with the actual pictures. I am guessing the pictures in this project are just a weird combination of colors and contrast causing the effect in certain areas. It's subtle, but I noticed a difference when I used different pictures. In regards to the video quality getting reduced in the translation to video, I probably had too high of an expectation with my new "toy" (the Canon DSLR).

I am good to go and appreciate all the help. The only thing still bugging me is when exporting directly to YouTube using the built-in preset/upload feature the quality is significantly better than when I export to AVI or burn a DVD. I wonderif it has something to do with the way it handles compression? Even though theYouTube version looks better I will utlimately want to go with Vimeo and DVD exports so I will have to settle.

Thanks again!
Frank

***UPDATE*****

I wanted to post an update because I tried something that came about through my obsessive tinkering. I exported my video using the recommended encoding settings on Vimeo and what a difference! Obviously the H.264 setting along with the higher resolution looks much better than a 720x480 AVI. This post seems to boil down to my lack of understanding of formats.

Does anyone have any suggestions for my workflow? I will sometimes export AVI segments for use in future projects but after noticing the difference in quality in exporting to AVI vs. H.264 I am second guessing myself. Should I continue to export AVI segments in use for future? Or, should I export segments in H.264 for future projects regardless of final output?

********

[Steve Grisetti]

If you're saving your standard-def video for future use in a project, you are always better off saving it as DV-AVIs.

Meantime, glad to hear of your success, Frank! I think we all learn a little from these kinds of projects.