DVD quality

[Barry Beckham]

I and others who I have spoken to have sucessfully created DVD's of our PTE slide shows via Ulead movie factory, but would like to see the resulting show better quality on our TV's.

While we accept the show will be viewed from 12 feet rather than 2 on the PC screen, we want the quality to be more comparable with the PC version.

Does anyone on this forum have experience of other software that does a better job or a technique that improves the DVD output quality. Experiments with image size perhaps, resolution.

In addition, modern widescreen TV's stretch the image so much that a flickering is often present in any slide where there is lots of detail. It is usually light and dark areas, a tree full of leaves, or the bricks in a side of a house.

I and one or two others would be interested in the forums thoughts.

Barry Beckham

[MikeL117]

Hi Barry

The problems you are seeing are in, the main, problems of the present TV standard. With a maximum resolution of around 720x576 pixels and a good 10% of this lost in the overscan area the amount of data is significantly less than a normal PC. Then the image is interlaced and the whole lot played at 25 frames per second which means that any fine detail particularly horizontal or diagonal lines flicker. On top of this the TV system has a much lower colour gamut than a computer system and finally the normal consumer TVs are not even capable of displaying the best that can be given to them.

Wide screen is a nuisance you either stretch it or crop it.

There are ways to reduce the visible effect of some of these problems.

Widescreen: Make two versions one for normal screen and one that has been pre-squashed from the 4x3 (or 5x4) aspect ratio to the 16x9 of the widescreen.

Overscan: do not have anything useful or important in the outside 10% of the pictures.

Flicker: soften or thicken all horizontal lines, blur any fine detail.

Gamut: Reduce the saturation of the images.

There is some good news on the horizon:- High Definition TV. This is starting to be introduced - slowly - with a much higher resolution. They come in two basic flavours, 1080 lines interlaced and 720 lines non-interlaced (progressive) and a horizontal resolution of 1922, 1440 and 1280 pixels.

DVD or video of a PTE show is, at present, simply a way of showing your presentation to a wider audience, mainly those who do not have access to a computer or incorporating a slide show into an exsisting piece of video. It is far from ideal and until HDTV and consumer TVs capable of displaying it (at an afordable price) become available, it will be the very poor relation to computer display. Still images will always have to be compromised to work well in a medium designed to show moving images.

Hope this gives an insight into some of the problems. The other aspect (can of worms ) that I have not mentioned is the extra level of compression that has to be applied to the flie before it can be put on DVD - that is an area that could give a marked improvment, possibly at the expence of reduced compatability with some DVD players.

[Ken Cox]

when the ability to go the AVI to Vcd/Svcd/dvd option first came out there were many complaints about quiver - shimmer -- sharpness etc.

i did not have a dvd burner so was limited to vcd/svcd -- soon found out that there were not many svcd capable players on the market so i concentrated my efforts to Vcd's.

I also visited specialty shops that have displays showing "ideal" stuff ie: Hollywood -- one in particular was Shrek -- on close examination in certain scenes there was edge quiver-- small but it was there -- I said to myself if Hollywood cant prevent it how can we?

When i was able to make dvd's i tried different things -- the most important were -- get rid of borders and use big pictures 600kb to 2 meg and let P2E compress them

then take the finished dvd's to the specialty shops and see what you work looks like on a variety of screens --- before i got into the dvd part i used to take a cd full of exe's to computer places and see what they looked like on various monitors.

Maybe my theory is wrong but i can tell you the same picture taken on 35mm film doesn’t compare to one taken on 120/6X6 film -- so is my thinking using 100kb picts to make a show vs the 600kb to 2 mb method wrong?

not according to my eyes when viewed on various screens - -as yet i have never seen any shows on a projector

what i would like to have are the tools to take the shared exes and put them on dvd so i can see what they look like in a room -- the tv brigtness/colour/contrast etc settings are rarely adjusted whereas a monitor and graphics card settings give out different views -- quite often the exe's are too dark when viewed on my monitor due to my personal settings - invariably when i make a show the brightness levels etc are perfect on the 5 tv's in my work room's

there was atopic on methods to open an exe long ago but i cant find it and the author of the thread no longer visits:(

where are you Stu??

ken

[LumenLux]

Thank you MikeL for well written info. Can you explain further re:

DVD or video of a PTE show is, at present, simply a way of showing your presentation to a wider audience, mainly those who do not have access to a computer or incorporating a slide show into an exsisting piece of video. It is far from ideal and until HDTV and consumer TVs capable of displaying it (at an afordable price) become available, it will be the very poor relation to computer display. Still images will always have to be compromised to work well in a medium designed to show moving images

On a recent effort in Peru, my friend shot video while I shot digital stills of our experience. Our "assignment" now is to produce a presentation for big screen projection to about 400-500 people. As we want to combine the two mediums, I am trying to determine whether we should include his video in my PTE show or include my PTE show in his video. We want the audience response to be to the content not the technique, but I know the technique can make a huge difference. Any counsel on such a project?

[MikeL117]

On a recent effort in Peru, my friend shot video while I shot digital stills of our experience. Our "assignment" now is to produce a presentation for big screen projection to about 400-500 people. As we want to combine the two mediums, I am trying to determine whether we should include his video in my PTE show or include my PTE show in his video.

On a recent effort in Peru, my friend shot video while I shot digital stills of our experience.  Our "assignment" now is to produce a presentation for big screen projection to about 400-500 people.  As we want to combine the two mediums, I am trying to determine whether we should include his video in my PTE show or include my PTE show in his video.

Hi

The simplest answer is include the video in with the PTE show. In practice there are many factors involved.

A lot depends on how you are projecting and also how the two parts (video and stills) are to be intermixed. First a few questions and my assumptions.

Are you using a computer to drive the projector? (I will assume yes)

What type of projector are you using and can it switch cleanly between computer and video sources? (for that size of audience I would expect you to be using a screen of about 3m wide or larger which will need a projector of about 5000 ANSI lumens, a modern three chip DLP will give a superb image. Even the high end projectors seldom switch cleanly.)

Do you have any other hardware to switch computer and video? (I will assume not)

Are you using any other software/hardware to mix computer and video (Watchout/Spider) (I will assume not)

Using PTE as the base dramatically improves the quality of the stills but as PTE does not directly support showing video the difficulty is cleanly switching between PTE and video and back. Using video as the base means compromising the stills quality, although by carefully selecting the appropriate codec this can be minimised.

In the end it will be the content that decides which method you choose. If the two shows are completely self-contained and separate then it is a matter of finding a method to acceptably switching between the two. If the two are intermixed it does become very difficult to smoothly go from the PTE to the video and back. A couple of changes would probably be okay but much more than that and it would get in the way of the content, unless you can find a way of incorporating the change into the show. Some of Boxig's utilities may help here.

If the two are to be intermixed the only slick solution is to incorporate the PTE sections into the video. This will allow a smooth transition between the stills and video. The problem then is how to display the best of the stills from within the video. I guess that the video is shot as DV which is a form MPEG2 with no temporal compression to make it ease to edit but it is interlaced. The best for the video is to show it in its native form (DV) but this would not be good for the PTE. It would be better to de-interlace and scale up the video before you add the PTE files. This is an area that needs a lot of experimentation. There are lots of codecs available, but few can work at large size and non-interlaced. There is also the problem of what the display computer is capable of playing without stuttering or losing sound sync. The formats that can, from memory, are Quicktime Animation (lossless compression, huge files, simple to decompress so does not put strain on CPU, good for intermediate files), MPEG2 (can be forced into 'different' formats, lossy compression, many and difficult options for compression, needs lots of computer power to play), MPEG4 (simple to compress, can work at lots of sizes as long as the pixel count is divisible by 16, higher quality than MPEG2 for the same compression, needs lots of computer power to play), Windows Media 9 (flexible sizes, lots of options for compression, needs more CPU power than any other, high quality). I think the Sorensen codecs may also do non-interlaced.

...

I hope the above has not confused you too much. The video option is capable of very good results but is quite complex as you need to work with more esoteric formats to get the best out of the PTE bits.

The easiest way to show the presentation without compromising either video or PTE is to have the two parts completely separate and having a natural break in between (a coffee or comfort break). Show the video in one part in its native format (do not transcode to DVD unless you really have to) then switch to the computer to show the PTE (produced at the native resolution of the projector)

[Ken Cox]

Robert

just keep in mind that something is better than nothing -- you could have had camera failure on the trip and got nothing.

My niece had battery problems climbing Kilamanjaro this summer - how do think she feels.

and ask Alrob about his problems while climbing.

count yourself lucky

we know you will do your best

ken

[alrobin]

Ken,

What problems? They were more like "challenges". At least I didn't have camera failure.

Robert,

Good luck with your presentation. That's some audience!