slideshow is blurry after rendering

[John Rofrano]

Forget rendering to uncompressed. It serves no purpose since DVD’s are MPEG-2. Just render to DVD MPEG-2 directly from the Vegas timeline and you will get the highest quality possible from Vegas.

What are you viewing the video on that makes you say that the pictures are blurry? Are the down-sized images blurry at all? Was the video sharper before you down-sized them? If so, maybe only downsize to 2x resolution. For 720×480 that would be 1440×960. This is the resolution I use on my photo montages and I don’t feel that they are blurry at all. Of course, if I watch them on my 50″ HDTV they look fuzzy but that’s because 720×480 doesn’t scale to 1920×1080 very well. They look absolutely fine on my 36″ SD TV.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jeff Pimentel]

What do you mean when you say render directly from the Vegas timeline? When I render I choose the “make movie” button at the top of the page and then step through the process in that fashion.

I am viewing the final product on a 46″ LCD HDTV. The down sized images are not blurry. I will try to resize to 1440 x 960 tonight and see what the result is. I am worried when I do that I will have the flickering problem again due to the panning and zooming I am doing in the video. What is your solution for the flicker issue with panning and zooming in a slideshow?

Any idea why the uncompressed template creates a choppy video? I have rendered with that template in the past with no issues and for some reason this project results in choppy video with the uncompressed template. What template should I use to fill the frame on a 46″ LCD HDTV, NTSC DV Widescreen template? Should the NTSC DV template render to a format to fit a standard 4:3 TV? When I use the NTSC DV template it still leaves black bars above and below the picture, and has large black bars on the left and right. Almost as if it is formatted in the horizontal direction for a standard TV.

I just want to know how I should render when I want a project to fill a 16:9 tv and also for a 4:3 tv. And how to get crisp pictures and not have the flicker issue due to high res pictures.

Thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.

[John Rofrano]

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> What do you mean when you say render directly from the Vegas timeline? When I render I choose the “make movie” button at the top of the page and then step through the process in that fashion.

Yes, that’s what I meant. Then make a DVD MPEG2 file.

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> I am viewing the final product on a 46″ LCD HDTV. The down sized images are not blurry. I will try to resize to 1440 x 960 tonight and see what the result is. I am worried when I do that I will have the flickering problem again due to the panning and zooming I am doing in the video. What is your solution for the flicker issue with panning and zooming in a slideshow?

If you are zooming a 720×480 image then you are probably causing the blurriness yourself by zooming in an image that is already full resolution. You really need to use 1440×960 if you plan to do any zooming. Also make sure you zoom with Pan/Crop and not Track Motion.

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> Any idea why the uncompressed template creates a choppy video? I have rendered with that template in the past with no issues and for some reason this project results in choppy video with the uncompressed template.

Uncompressed requires a huge amount of disk IO and your PC probably can keep up with the demand.

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> What template should I use to fill the frame on a 46″ LCD HDTV, NTSC DV Widescreen template?

Yes, but your project should also be widescreen and all of your images should be cropped to a widescreen aspect. Otherwise you will get black bars on the sides.

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> Should the NTSC DV template render to a format to fit a standard 4:3 TV?

Yes, but your project should also be 4:3 and all of your images should be cropped to a 4:3 aspect. Otherwise you will get black bars on the top and bottom.

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> When I use the NTSC DV template it still leaves black bars above and below the picture, and has large black bars on the left and right. Almost as if it is formatted in the horizontal direction for a standard TV.

Here is the “rule of thumb”. Everything needs to be the same aspect to look right. 16:9 project, 16:9 event crop, 16:9 render template OR 4:3 project, 4:3 event crop, 4:3 render template. They all have to match with no mixing.

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> I just want to know how I should render when I want a project to fill a 16:9 tv and also for a 4:3 tv.

You can’t. You can either have one or the other.

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> And how to get crisp pictures and not have the flicker issue due to high res pictures.

Try 1440×960 on a small test project and see. Don’t forget to enable Reduce Interlace Flicker on all of the images and you can add a slight .001 vertical Gaussian blur on images that are still flickering.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jeff Pimentel]

Thanks I will try your advice and let you know if that works. Thanks for clarifying the setup for project, crop and render template.

What is a good program to use to resize photos that is free on the internet. I tried using Microsoft Office Picture Manager and for some reason it adds a red tone to the skin of people in the pictures.

[Mike Kujbida]

I’ve used Irfanview for a long time.
Great program (and free) that does batch resizing and more.

[John Rofrano]

I use Paint Shop Pro 9. It’s not free but that’s what I do all of my image editing in. I have a 1440×960 crop set up that I can resize and still maintain the aspect. This allows me to select the area that I’m interested in and know that when I resize I will not get distortion (i.e., it will resize and maintain aspect).

That’s the problem with batch resizing, if your images are not the aspect of the video they will get squashed or stretched. In that case you want a program that will just resize in one dimension so that the aspect is maintained. I don’t know if InfranView can do that but that’s what you want.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Kujbida]

[John Rofrano] “I don’t know if InfranView can do that but that’s what you want.”

John, IrfanView is capable of doing that.
You have options to set a new size to a specific height and/or width or choose a percentage of the original.
There’s also an option to retain the current aspect ratio if desired.

[John Rofrano]

way cool… I’m gonna have to get me a copy. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Kujbida]

JOhn, make sure to get the plugins that go along with it as they add even more functionality.

[Andre Anthonio]

Hello, folks. I came across this thread while investigating how I can improve the picture quality of a slide show which I created in Sony Vegas. My slide show appeared to be fine on a computer/small monitor but became quite blurry when viewed on a large flat screen
TV. After reading many threads, I now understand that my source photo files were too large for Vegas (3872X2592) and needed to be downsized to (1440X960)…thanks JR. I’ve also been following some related comments about what software program is best to achieve this goal of down sizing. I heard about IrfanView and it was already installed on my computer by computer helper of mine who saves my ass on the regular. So, I tried it for the first time today and am immediately sold on its usefulness. If you need to re-size your photos, and lots of them, as which was the case in my situation, Irfanview has a “batch/conversion” option. Once you go there you can choose an “advanced” settings, and once there you can “resize your photos” by just entering “1440” for the width and/or “960” for the length. More importantly, you can add all the photos you want to resize with one click of a button, and then save them in the same file name or rename them. In my case, I did NOT want to rename them. Instead, I saved them to a different folder on my computer. This way when I opened the same project, Sony Vegas would prompt to “specify files in new location”. Once I answered that question for Vegas, Vegas would ask to use the same folder/location for all the rest of the missing files, which I replied “yes” (of course). In the end, I was able to redo my entire project involving hundreds of photos in just a few short minutes (under an hour to be honest). So, if you were like me, sweating to have to do the entire project over again, and stressing that you would have to redo all of your pan and crop movements, just because you didn’t downsize your over sized photos from the start, here’s your solution. Worked great for me. Thanks to all who contributed to this thread.

Andre Antonio
PHATeFX Panama