Poor Quality AVI

[Guest]

I made a slide show in MM2, with background music, transitions, the works.
When I save to DV-AVI, the picture quality goes bad when viewed using either WM9 and Real Player. Also, there is some minor popping and drops in the audio portion.
I took the file and used TMPGeng to encode it, then Nero Express to burn a VCD (no DVD writer, only CD). Doggone If it didn't play the first time. The transitions are smooth, the movie stops where it's supposed to, etc.
(I know ther are other slide show programs that may be better, but one day I hope to capture video and combine it with still shots, so I'm sticking with the MM2 format for now.)
I just need to clean up the picture quality and make the audio better. Any ideas?

 

[Graham Hughes, MVP Digital Media]

If all is fine on the vcd can you not just pay that in the pc? For things to
look at. MM doesn't like jpegs best to use bitmap. It doesn't like mp3's
best to use wma. MM is really a video editing app, M/S do photostory which
you have to buy, but is designed for making slideshows, see www.papajohn.org
and look for the link to the sister site on photostory to see if it may help
you if you intend making lots of theses.
Graham

--
Graham Hughes
MVP
www.simplydv.co.uk
www.dvds2treasure.com

I made a slide show in MM2, with background music, transitions, the works.
When I save to DV-AVI, the picture quality goes bad when viewed using

either WM9 and Real Player. Also, there is some minor popping and drops in
the audio portion.

I took the file and used TMPGeng to encode it, then Nero Express to burn a

VCD (no DVD writer, only CD). Doggone If it didn't play the first time. The
transitions are smooth, the movie stops where it's supposed to, etc.

(I know ther are other slide show programs that may be better, but one day

I hope to capture video and combine it with still shots, so I'm sticking
with the MM2 format for now.)

I just need to clean up the picture quality and make the audio better. Any

ideas?

 

[Guest]

Well, the goal is to eventually write to VCD or DVD, allowing the "technically challenged" grandparents to view the stills and movies on a TV.
MM2 is great for putting a "movie" together and watching it on your own PC. But the fun is in sharing the creation, which seems to be where all the trouble comes in. (Not just me, look at all the different threads!)
But back to cases. Why is my AVI file so poor? I thought AVI was supposed to be a great format for saving and editing, since it takes up so much space.
PapaJohn has written that SVI drops every 27th frame in their tests, has anyone come up with a software solution?
Thanks!

 

[Rehan]

Hi CSFlanagan,

For still slideshows the quality mostly depends on the size of the output
you export from Movie Maker. Furthermore, DV AVI format is *not* the best
choice of export when the input is mostly still photos. The reason for this
anamoly is that DV AVI uses non-square pixel encoding. A 4:3 frame gets
encoded into 720x576 or 720x480 sized frame of DV AVI, which do not have 4:3
ratio.

If your final target outpu is a DVD or (S)VCD, then converting to a non 4:3
ratio frame is unavoidable. My observation is that non 1-to-1 pixel mapping
whcn exporting from Movie Maker suffers from quality loss since Movie Maker
does not use a good resizing algorithm it seems. On the other hand having
TMPGenc to do this mapping does not seem to suffer that much of quality loss


Therefore for best results for still slideshows:

* export using a WMV profile
* make sure the pixel encoding for this WMV prifle is square (frame size
would be 4:3 ratio)
* export to maximum frame size you can get and a frame size which is integer
multiple/divisor of your input pictures. (Example input picture: 2048x5396,
you may use 1024x768 frame size profile)
* Use TMPGenc to encode using Constant bitrate or Quality bitrate.
* consider using SVCD if it is supported on the players of your target
folks.
* better still, most new dvd players can do "cDVD" or miniDVD which is the
DVD on a CD.

If it is supported then miniDVD would allow you to use full DVD style menus
and chapters. Just remember NOT to use very high bitrate for encoding MPEG2
as even those players that support miniDVD cannot read that fast from a CD
media. The bitrate for SVCD is around 2.5Mbpps which is more than enough for
still photo slideshows.

Note: You can get a couple of big frame size output profiles from Papjohn
site which work very nicely.
http://www.eicsoftware.com/PapaJohn/MM2/MM2-SavingMovies-CustomProfiles.html

Furthermore you may be interested in high quality pan zoom effects I provide
on my site which allow 15 day free trial and remain useful for small size
outputs even after trial period expires.