DVD Blurry

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DVD Blurry

Postby zukini98 » Wed Oct 23, 2013 5:28 pm

I'm using ProShow 5 and created 19 minute slideshow. The show looked great on my Dell laptop, but when I burned the DVD, using high quality burn settings, and then played the DVD on a new Blu ray player, the video was blurry on a 42" TV. Slideshow was set to 16:9.

What can I do to improve the quality of the playback? What settings should I be using to be sure recipients of my slideshows will be able to view a good quality product? Would I get better results burning to a Blu ray disc?

I generated the slideshow for my niece's softball team and I really don't want it to look like "my aunt made it." Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks,
Suzanne

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Re: DVD Blurry

Postby gpsmikey » Wed Oct 23, 2013 7:53 pm

Unfortunately, there are a bunch of things that can affect what is going on here. Do normal DVD's look good played on the same player/TV combination? (not blueray disks) Generally, the blueray players will be connected to the TV with a HDMI cable, but somewhere (usually in the player) the SD video from a standard DVD gets up-converted to the HD that the TV displays. There are several different points where that can go wrong. If normal DVD's look good when played, then we may be looking at a problem with the show itself, but first you need to establish that normal DVD's (not blue ray) look good. Try playing the DVD you created on other players and your laptop - how do they look.

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
Lots of PIC and Arduino microprocessor stuff too !!

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Re: DVD Blurry

Postby zukini98 » Thu Oct 24, 2013 5:26 pm

Hi Mikey,

Thanks for your response. I have a 2 DVD set from Tangled - one Blu Ray and one regular DVD. The regular DVD looks great when I play it on the Blu Ray DVD Player.

I took the same DVD and played it on an older, very cheap DVD player on a 13" TV and it looked fine - very clear. I pulled an older DVD from 2005 and that one played clearly as well.

Per your suggestion I took one of the DVDs I burned of my show and played the DVD on my laptop. The DVD quality is not as good as playing the show directly from the Pro Show application on the same laptop.

What would you suggest?

Is this a problem with my burn settings?

Is it an issue with the DVD burner on my laptop? I've got a Dell inspiron 17R. Laptop hardware shows PLDS&Prod_DVD+-RW_DU-8A5HH. The DVD software on my laptop is Cyberlink PowerDVD 10.

I hope you'll have a magic answer for me:)

Thanks again,
Suzanne

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Re: DVD Blurry

Postby cherub » Thu Oct 24, 2013 9:29 pm

So, I understand that you don't have a BLUE-RAY DVD BURNER, and no high definition disks?
You are burning a regular DVD disk, with a regular burner, and you want to play it on a blueray player and to see a high definition video?

Just asking... :D

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Re: DVD Blurry

Postby gpsmikey » Thu Oct 24, 2013 10:28 pm

Actually, playing SD on a BD player connected to a TV via HDMI can work quite well (that is the arrangement I have and it actually looks quite good although recently, I have been playing with mp4 in 720P across the network). So we have established that a commercial SD DVD looks significantly better played on the same hardware - this does tend to point in the direction of some setting you have that is giving a lower quality DVD. In general, it will not be the burner - people tend to still think of the burner in terms of the old "analog" days of vinyl records etc where a bad (or cheap) cartridge made a big difference in the sound. DVD's are digital - strickly 1's and 0's getting read off the disk. If the reader/burner has trouble putting those down, then what you typically see is either lots of pixelation when the data rate can't keep up or "studdering" in the images. If the image is blurry then it is more likely a problem with how the data was encoded or rendered. I'm not sure exactly what you are running into at this point, but a couple of things you can try - go the route many of us do and create an ISO instead of direct burning (in the Publish section where you select the burner, one of the options is to create an ISO). You can then play that ISO with the free VLC player and see how that looks on your laptop. As far as why the "preview" on your laptop (played from within Gold) looks better, that is entirely possible - the preview can have a higher resolution than the DVD - a SD DVD is 720*480 while your preview may be higher than that and LCD displays (like on the laptop) look much better when you match their resolution. Unfortunately, I have not run into any "blurry" issues with my DVD's, so I have not worked that problem. I have seen other posts here from folks complaining of that - you might search the forum for what they have run into and see if that fits the problem. One comment to finish my thought on the ISO process (sorry, I was just headed off to bed here - Mona is just getting going though for her day :D ). What many of us do is create an ISO in Proshow, then use the free Imgburn utility to burn 1 or more disks from that ISO. Imgburn lets you set the burn speed as well as verify the burn afterwards. The advantage to an ISO is you can then make as many identical disks as you want from that ISO. Yeah, I know I sort of started rambling. Bedtime.

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
Lots of PIC and Arduino microprocessor stuff too !!

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Re: DVD Blurry

Postby zukini98 » Fri Oct 25, 2013 6:54 am

Hi Mikey and Cherub,

Thanks very much for getting back with me.

Cherub - I am burning a regular DVD on a regular DVD burner (not Blu Ray) and playing the DVD on a Blu Ray player. However, I also played the same show DVD on an older DVD player and the results were the same.

Mikey,
After your post last night I did create an ISO file and used Imgburn to create the DVD. Unfortunately the quality did not improve. I did choose a slower speed (4) in Imgburn to create the DVD.

Part of my show includes the Sports Effects Pack. I used the Softball slide with the player stats. Even that slide is not as sharp when playing from the DVD. I understand that there may be some loss of quality on the photos, but there shouldn't be on the ProShow slides, right?

And just to mention one more time - I played the DVD I burned on the DVD player on my laptop - the same hardware that burned the DVD - and the picture quality was not great, still fuzzy. I'm not looking for perfection, but I would like to present a show that my niece can be proud of when she shares it with her friends.

So here's the recap:

1. Created a show and burned to DVD via ProShow Gold 5 and from an ISO file via Imgburn
2. Both DVDs had the same sub-par quality
3. Playing the DVDs on a Blu Ray player or an older DVD player showed the same fuzzy quality
4. Viewing the DVD on a 13" tube TV or a 42" plasma TV looked the same. My sister played the DVD on a 60" TV and said it was terrible.

Should I consider trying a Blu Ray burner? Would this correct the issues and provide better overall picture quality?

Thanks again for your time and your feedback. I know you'll help me get there:)

Suzanne

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Re: DVD Blurry

Postby gpsmikey » Fri Oct 25, 2013 10:19 am

Blue Ray does provide higher resolution over the SD which is limited by definition to 720*480 for NTSC (you don't say where you are located), however, my SD disks seem to look very similar to the commercial ones when played on the same hardware. I think we are looking at a different issue here, but I'm not sure just what you are running into. You are correct in the comment about losing some resolution on the images simply because of the fact you are limited to 720*480 by the DVD and typically, most DSLR's shoot significantly higher resolution shots than that, however, it should still look pretty good. I have a couple of ideas I need to think about a bit here. How big is he iso for your show?

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
Lots of PIC and Arduino microprocessor stuff too !!

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