Size and resolution of photo image for

Thanks dizpark,
I fear that I have been (accidentally) sailing under false colours.  I am actually from the UK - so my TV is PAL and not NTSC. 
Can you confirm that this makes no difference to your very useful advice?
You are correct in assuming that I am not working with Blu-Ray.  I will try to catch up with the modern world!
Roger

rogernixon

Being in PAL land makes no difference in therms of my advice. PAL resolution will be essentially in the same ballpark 720x576.  So you photos most probably far exceed these dimensions. I surmise that you are struggling with softish look of the DVDs that you produce. As I said I am pretty sure that this has nothing to do with your photos being too low resolution.  The real catchya is the anti-aliasing(anti-flicker) option that should be ticked off when making a DVD. See this thread there are screenshots where you can see the relevant setting.

http://www.magix.info/us/different-settings-for-picture-playback.knowledge.674002.html

Try making a DVD with this setting off and see if it helps with sharpness.  If it sharper, then what's the point of anti-flicker ON setting you may ask. Are you watching your slideshow on an old tube TV?  Then you may end up seeing some flicker on some slides that contain fine horizontal lines (I guess you may see it also on modern HD flatscreen TVs but less so). Anti-flicker filter is meant to defeat this flickering but it is a very rough tool because it destroys sharpness in ALL the slides. If you find the flicker objectionable then you can optimise that individual slide(s) by applying a low strength blur to that individual slide(s). You say you are using PhotoStory on CD & DVD 10.  I take it that it is NOT the Deluxe version. I am not familiar with the non-deluxe version in terms of what features are taken out, so maybe the blur is not available as part of the picture optimisation routine in the non-deluxe version.

Thanks dizpark,
I fear that I have been (accidentally) sailing under false colours.  I am actually from the UK - so my TV is PAL and not NTSC. 
Can you confirm that this makes no difference to your very useful advice?
You are correct in assuming that I am not working with Blu-Ray.  I will try to catch up with the modern world!
Roger

hi dispark.could you explain--- what is a wide colour space?

Roger

You are preparing a DVD and you are in the NTSC land (US) , right?  So the DVD resolution will be 720x480.  So your photos should be at least this resolution or bigger for zooms and pans (and almost all photos these days are much larger :). DPI and all that stuff has got nothing to do with the way pictures are displayed on the monitor or TV - forget that. And there is almost no point optimising your pictures resolution before importing them into photostory for quality reasons. Photostory will do all the resizing for you.  You may want to limit the size of the imported photos for speed reasons if you have a slow computer.

Go with JPEG, no need for TIFF.  If you edit the pictures before importing them into photostory, make sure they are in sRGB (not in aRGB or any wider color space).  

If you are battling with softness of the produced DVD on an 40 inch screen then there are two issues here

a) DVD is not the ideal source for such a large screen, the quality from Blu-ray or any other HD source would be much better.

b) even DVD can look OK (especially if your TV or the DVD player has a good upscaler). As I answered in the other thread the anti-flicker "on" option might be the real culprit. It is 'on' by default and blurs ALL of the slideshow, just to make sure that you don' t get flickering on some photos. 

Thanks Surefoot,

I am glad you are not techy as I would not have understood a word you said.  Your advice is most helpful.

Roger

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCHD   You may want to check this google inquirey out--it talks about HD and standard types of info---  good luck

Hi Roger,

     I'm not a techy. I did a DVD last year it turned out great. Firstly, I do know that jpeg is the way to go. Look it up in a search. They tell you about how it is a professional standard. A TIFF file is used for printing purposes across the net. Also to the best of my knowlege 320 dpi. is a standard that is used. I'll have to look that up myself. My dvd was viewed on a number of tv's most of the photos looked great. I had a mixture of different sizes. I take it you meant 600x800. I used all photos in full 3000x4000 they look great.  The format of the being 16x9  would be the best, considering tv's are made that way. When I copied the show I used to fit monitor. this is in the copy setup. You also must check out the type of DVD that you intend to copy. Some formats have poor to good quality.  good luck.

     hope you find a techy to help   -------  google what you don't know