Improving quality of inserted images in HD

[topshot]

I recently tried my first HD video (finally have a camera that can go above 640x480) and the video portions are fine but most of the pics I inserted came out quite pixelated. Oddly, a couple of them did come out looking fine. They were all, of course, higher res and not the same aspect ratio. Any tips on how I can make them ALL look good? Is all that is needed is shooting the stills in 16:9? I don't want to waste my time cropping.

[Dougie]

Hi topshot! You kind of answered this yourself. Of course, the higher the res, the better anything will look. Some image hunting engines, like Googles, list the image atributes and available sizes of images they offer. Look for images bigger then 640x480 (preferably at least 1280 x720). Shooting your own stills, as you mentioned is better yet, as it gives you full control. Yes, if your still camera gives a true 16:9 aspect, it should work without cropping. I do a lot of cropping myself, doesn't take long.

[topshot]

I guess I was just surprised it affected it so much when it had so many pixels (2816x2112) to use. I would have expected blurry if anything rather than pixelated. It should have been a simple resize to 34%. It kept the same 4:3 aspect ratio, of course, adding bars on both sides. But I'm puzzled why some did come out looking fine???

 

Never had this issue when doing 640x480 videos and inserted stills that were normally 5X that size. Maybe I can just notice more since it's bigger? The clip is on

- first thing is a still that shows this pixelation on the car front, canoe and shadows. The still at 0:57 is terrible. A simple re-size shouldn't cause this. Yet the stills at 4:50 and 6:19 (the one right before this one is terrible also) look good.

[topshot]

OK, any other suggestions why some stills look terrible? I took only 16:9 pics to match the video AR this time with no noticeable change. I used the recommended MPEG4 compressor with 2048 avg and 4096 max bitrates (the defaults).

[topshot]

I just finished running some short tests with 1280x720 video and 16:9 pictures (in JPG format) and I've determined the following:

1. The first still of any grouping of stills looks highly pixelated while the others (if there's more than one pic in the group) normally look fine.

2. It doesn't make any difference if the still is the original resolution (or aspect ratio) or has been resized (or cropped) to be the same as the video resolution.

3. It doesn't make any difference if I'm using the native MPEG4 or H264 encoder. * See my best solution below

4. It doesn't matter if frame rate is 15 or 29.97.

5. It doesn't matter if there's no transition between a clip and the still. * See my best solution below

6. It's much worse in HD. Saving the movie in 640x480 normally doesn't have the issue as far as I could tell though once it was obvious for some reason.

 

BTW, I'm using v2.41, not the newer ones everyone seems to have issues with.

 

So far my best solution is to use H264 encoder but I must increase quality level to 28 from the default of 32 AND I must use fade instead of my preferred crossfade for all first stills after a video clip (or start of the movie). It takes much longer (over 4x) to encode, but MPEG4 just plain doesn't work. It was also 33% larger. So this is really no solution because that's not acceptable. Not sure what to do other than leave the stills out but that detracts from the trip report.

 

Any other suggestions???