Thanks for the quick response John.  The bitrate is fine.  There are about 300 photos making the slideshow aproximate 37 min. long.  I rechechecked settings.  When I hit the adapt bitrate it said that the setting if fine, that there is plenty of room.  I did go ahead and increase the  quality of it to 'slow better quality"...but this didnt make any difference.  I am really stumped on this one.  The only thing different from all the other DVDs that I have made is the amount of photos.  I hope you or  someone has the answer for me.  I have a deadline on getting this done ;(  Thanks again so much.

Hi

. . . . When I hit the adapt bitrate it said that the setting if fine, that there is plenty of room . . . 

That is not what you need as it does nothing if the movie will already fit on the disc.

You need to fill the disc with as much data as possible by increasing the bitrate to the highest setting possible while fitting the movie on the disc.

For example if the movie is 1 hour long then it will occupy about half the disc space at the standard bitrate, by increasing the bitrate you fill the disc with more data but it still has a 1 hour movie on it. 

The more data per second, ie a higher bitrate, the player has, the better the image quality

John

John, thanks again for getting back to me.  I did increase the bitrate to the highest setting and it didnt seem to make a difference other than yes, like you said...adding alittle more data to the disc, but most of the photos are still appearing blurry.  These photos are not blurry in the timeline of the photoshow, nor when I run it in photoshow for preview.  They are only appearing blurry after I have burned them onto DVD.  I play the DVD back both on my computer and in my home DVD player (2 actually).  Im stumped John and As Ive said, Ive ran this before with far less pictures using the same method with the same software.  (I shoot my photos in raw format, then export them to a folder as full size jpegs  that I then import to Photoshow Deluxe).  Any other ideas or settings that I can possibly check?  Again...thanks so much for your help. 

Hi,

What are you using to convert your RAW images?  What resolution do you shoot in(assume RAW).  When you do the conversion, what what changes do you allow the conversion program to do (dpi).  Which camera and lens do you use to shoot the images?  I understand that you have done this before and I am not trying to be difficult, but since John's answer did not solve your problem, (and when I first saw it I thought it would), we need to dig deeper.  By the way, have you updated all of the apps involved in this process, including your system and peripheral drivers?  Finally what Video resolution are you using for your project.  Just some thoughts.

George

gandjcarr....Please stay tuned. ;)  I do need your help but I am unable to respond fully right now.  Can you please check back for more information from me tomorrow.  I SO MUCH appreciate your help.

Hi

. . . . I shoot my photos in raw format, then export them to a folder as full size jpegs  that I then import to Photoshow Deluxe . . . 

That could be exacerbating the problem - I am taking a long shot here  - Photostory is having to resize a relatively large image probably full resolution of the camera down to 720*576 PAL / 720*480 NTSC which IMO is not a good idea.

In my image editor I always rescale and crop images, from my Canon digital camera,  to double the resolution of the movie ie for 1920 * 1080 (BD) or 720 * 576 (DVD) I would resize/crop to 3840 * 2160 or 1440 * 1152 and then apply a reasonable amount of sharpening - ie enough to give a good sharp image without visible halos or artefacts.

The reasons I use double the movie size is so that I can zoom in on to a section of the image if required and also any rescaling factor to full screen ie 1920 * 1080 is an even number.

I also apply a small amount of sharpening to the movie project as well.

John

Thank you John and gandjcarr.  Here is what I do.  I import my photos into Lightroom 5 which imports them as .dng  I then do my editing in Lightroom 5 or Photoshop CC.  After editing I then export them from Lightroom 5 (using the export button, not drop down list) to a file on my desktop.  The files are then.jpg.  When I hover over the photos in the folder they read to be a size ranging 1.5mb to 8mg.  IF I open (any) one of the them in photoshop and open Image size the avg. size is 34mg (so avg photo is 2599 x 3731) (varies per picture) with all of them being 300 resolution.

When I run preview inside the Photostory everything looks fine on small screen as well as large.  All photos are clear and detailed.   My problems are somewhere in the burning.  The settings I am using for The DVD burn are "Standard DVD NTSC" 2D Standard.  I have tried raising/and lowering the bitrate as well as the quality, each time with the same result of what I can best explain as a Gaussian blur over the entire photo.  I even tried burning a DVD again from a prior project that burned sucessfully before and ended up with the same blurry results on it. The pile of bad burned DVD's is growing ;)   I have updated everything I can possibly think to update,  All drivers, etc. 

I realize this is a tough one when you cant actually see what is happening on my computer, and me not being a "Pro" at this makes it even harder to explain.  I hope I was able to convey to you the information needed. Please let me know if there is any other information I can give you.

Intel Core Duo cpu P8700 2.53 GHz, Windows 7, 64-bit operating system, 6gb memory

Thanks again for any help you can give me.

Also, I have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M graphics card.  Driver has been updated on that as well.

Update:  I have tried sharpening the slideshow as suggested by John and this did not help the problem.  I see the sharpening take affect in the preview...but onced burned onto DVD I still get the same blurry photos.  ALSO, I installed the software onto another computer and I am having the same problem.  The blurriness is almost like the program is taking the "Sharpening" slider and sliding it all the way to the left. (Thats just a reference to how the photos look).  I am just totally stumped on this after trying just about all the settings I can possibly find in the program.

Help. :/