Ask questions to BD authoring and compression insider "2themax"

[2themax]

Originally Posted by zicmubleu

2themax - I have encoded slideshows of jpeg images into a Blu-ray format but I don't think I have done it well, or as well as I should. I start with 14MP images that are 4592 x 3056 size, obviously not a 16:9 format. I do some processing of the jpeg image in Photoshop CS and crop them to a 16:9 size when that didn't lose portions of the image I wanted to keep. I then use Sony Vegas 8.0 to render a first pass (?) video file and then import that into Architect 4.5 for authoring. My earliest attempts worked but it always seemed to end up recompressing the files in the Architect authoring step. I have a couple of questions for the steps I use:

1 Cropping the jpeg image - should I leave it at the maximum pixel size with a 16:9 ratio or reduce it to a 1920x1080 size to reduce file size?

2 What output file type should I use in Vegas to reduce the chance of needing recompression in Architect and also keep the best PQ?

I am creating a slideshow of more than 500 images, which exceeds Architects file handling. So by using Vegas I can group jpeg files together and create a rendered file for import. So for the first question it is a matter of whether using Photoshop to reduce the image size will result in better quality than letting Vegas do the work? I think I lost quality when I reduced it in Photoshop rather than Vegas, but it does make the render process shorter, less prone to failure, etc. For that I might be able to reduce the number of images to group together and create more intermediate rendered files to keep them at maximum size for import to Vegas.

For step 2 I really can't figure out what is best to use, there are many choices but since I want to get a 1920x1080 image size it reduces it to just a few such as MainConcept Mpeg-2, or Video for Windows (*.avi 1920x1080).

There are two lesser choices Windows Media Video V9 (*.wmv 1440x1080), or Sony AVC (1440x1080) but I don't want to give up so many pixels.

I do add a sound track but I am not concerned with its quality at this time, these are for personal use only.

I would do the resizing of the photos in Photoshop. It will be a lengthy process with that many photos, but you'll have better results.

Coming out of Vegas, I'd go with an MPEG2 encode using one of the 1920x1080 templates for Blu-ray. Architect shouldn't reencode the video that way. I don't have Architect to test that out though.