Nero 5 and photographic stills

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How do I play the stills of a vcd on a dvd player? Last night I used Nero 5 and dragged and dropped about 10 jpegs and some VCD clips into Nero and burned a VCD. The mpeg tracks played fine, but the jpegs just flickered and had no color to them. Did I do something wrong?

-- scot virnoche (scot.virnoche@med.ge.com), September 07, 2000

Answers

Ahh, more information ( i'm snowmoon on vcdhelper ). Yes, you did, or should I say nero did. Nero encoded the files at PAL resolution. This made your phillips DVD player output a PAL signal ( the flickering and no color gives this away ). Before dropping the images on nero do a bicibic resample to 704x480 for hi-rez images and 352x240 for low rez images.

Good luck.

-- eric (eric@nospam.snowmoon.com), September 07, 2000.


That sounds too time consuming. Why can't Nero do the resizing properly? I was told it could!

-- Scot (scot.virnoche@med.ge.com), September 07, 2000.

It does, but it appears to choose the closes size t owhat it needs, so if you have a hi-rez it will convert it to 704x576 but this is a PAL resolution not ntsc, and phillips are notorious for not being able to do the conversion.

ACDsee has a built in html page generator that does thumbnails, you could set the thumbnails to 704x480 and batch convert all images at once, just delete the html file when done.

-- eric (eric@nospam.snowmoon.com), September 07, 2000.


How do I do that? Where can I get ACDSee? Can you give me instructions on how to do this? Thanks in advance.

-- scot (scot@blah,blah,blah.com), September 07, 2000.

http://www.acdsystems.com/index.htm

Is the main page, they have a trial version availble. You can try it out. You could also probably find a freeware tool at...

http://www.tucows.com/

And if you like ACDsee and would like to "extend" the trial period.

http://astalavista.box.sk/

Happy encoding

-- eric (eric@nospam.snowmoon.com), September 07, 2000.



This is one limitation in Nero about MPEG stills on VCD. Where in VideoPack one is deliberately asked whether the output resolution is going to be 480 or 576, Nero just senses where it's closest and truncates it to that one. That's why, with a single system TV and player, and a variety of JPEGs over and under 500 (H-res) were dragged into the layout, it's possible to see the stills become B/W during the times it's NOT the system of the TV being played at. To avoid this, resample the JPEGs beforehand so that they are 704x576 if you want them to play back as PAL and 704x480 if you want NTSC. It can become tedious, quite rightly, if you had hundreds of JPEGs; in this forum, Ross McL has dealt with this more than most.

-- Mehmet T. (turk690@yahoo.com), September 09, 2000.

This is true as soon as I sized my jpgs using photoshop it worked in the philips 701. I wrote an action to image size the jpgs to 480px verticaly and croped the width to 704px horizontaly and adjusted the levels to 16 for black and 235 for white. batched them and this worked perfectly. the levels adjust is not nececary but it makes them look better.

-- Brian VanPortfleet (wsd@i2k.com), January 04, 2001.

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