Export & Burn - Project Sharp, Export or Burn slightly fuzzy

William-McWhirter wrote on 10/5/2021, 3:31 AM

Up until I had to uninstall Photostory and reinstall because effects were not working I was able to export and burn my projects and get sharp clarity with DVD quality. Now these photos are all slightly hazy on export or burn to DVD quality and type is MPEG-4. On the project view the photos are very sharp.
I am operating Photostory Deluxe version 29.0.1.74. I have created several projects onto DVD RW discs and never had this problem.
I just tried an export using WMV as the format and HD720 as the quality and the same thing happened, a slight fuzziness around all objects.
Do we have a clue what this might be?

Comments

johnebaker wrote on 10/5/2021, 4:37 AM

@William-McWhirter

The most common reasons for this are:

exporting to a higher resolution - upscaling - from a lower resolution eg 720 x 576 PAL (720 x480 NTSC) to FullHD 1920 x 1080

and/or
exporting to MP4 and selecting an option eg quality that reduces the bitrate of the video, ie each video frame has less data which results in lower visual quality for the given resolution exporting to.

What is your source video resolution?

Which MP4 export preset are you using?

John EB

William-McWhirter wrote on 10/8/2021, 8:29 PM

Thanks for the tips.

I definitely cannot get the same quality on a DVD that I have used previously. I tried to burn a number of times and with the best quality settings, but to no avail.

I have exported to MPEG-4 with Full HD setting, and this does provide clear pictures on playback. I tried exporting to DVD and using WMV but again not a good result. I also burned my project using AVCHD to a 16GB stick which took some 16 hours, but the quality was perfect. Unfortunately, the system had an error and only produced 50% of the video. Total length of video was 8.87GB only 4.2GB created.

In all my attempts I have stopped all other applications running, closed down my system and started up with only Photostory Deluxe running, apart from standard system software.

I think I will take the advice and get a BluRay disc burner and disc to try and always achieve the high quality playback.

I will consider this issue closed.

johnebaker wrote on 10/9/2021, 5:27 AM

@William-McWhirter

. . . . I definitely cannot get the same quality on a DVD that I have used previously. . . . .

DVD is relatively poor quality, especially when upscaled on a Smart TV depending on the quality of the upscaler built into it.

Have you changed the viewing device you are playing the disc on?

Before buying a BD burner you can test your disc creation and results as follows:

In the Burn dialog select the Image recorder option, when you click Burn save the ISO image that will be created in a folder of your choice and give it a name.

Once the ISO image is created, use Windows File Explorer to mount it as a 'disc' drive - double click the ISO should do this.

Play the 'disc' using VLC .

HTH

John EB