Blurry Pictures in Premiere

Question

Hello,
I have created a slide show in Photoshop Elements 10. I clicked on output to send it to Premiere Elements 10 because my pictures were blurry/pixilated when I viewed them in full screen preview, but they were not blurry/pixilated in the screen above the timeline.
Once I had my slide show in Premiere, I finished making edits, created a DVD menu for it and then went to burn it to a DVD. None of the pictures were blurry in the screen above the sceneline. When I went to burn it to a DVD, I unchecked the box "fit to available space" and slid the quality slider all the way to the right. Most of the pictures were fine, but some are still blurry/pixilated.
Why is this happening and how can I correct it? Please provide detailed steps as I have only been using Premiere for about 2 weeks.

Answer 1

Chris,
Let's look at the workflow for a moment.
You started with JPEG, which is a compressed format to begin with. The Images are the full resolution that the camera produces. As an example, I will use my Nikon - and I would have JPEG "originals" at ~ 3000 x 4000 pixels.
Video will be approximately 720 x 480 pixels (NTSC) for SD DVD-Video, or up to 1920 x 1080 for HD BD (Blu-ray Disc) output.
The 3000 x 4000 is larger than either, and by a good amount, especially for DVD-Video. PrE will have to Scale the 3000 x 4000 to get the full Image into the Video Frame, or will effectively crop the 720 x 480, or 1920 x 1080 out of the 3000 x 4000 Image, leaving a lot of unused pixels, that MUST be handled at some point.
PrE has Scaling algorithms to accomplish the Scale of the Still Images, BUT they are not as good as those in Photoshop, or Photoshop Elements. Photoshop also offers several versions of the Scaling algorithms, such as Bicubic, Bicubic Sharper, Bicubic Smoother, etc. (Not sure about PSE in this regard.) The quality will be better, if one does the Scaling in PS/PSE first, and then Imports the Scaled Images into PrE.
As JPEG is a compressed format, if one keeps compressing each successive output to JPEG, more compression WILL take place, throwing out data, that can never be recovered, except by going back to the original Still Images, and starting over. Especially, if starting with compressed JPEG, I do not use that format for any additional generation, but use PSD, the native format of Photoshop, which is NOT compressed, and which will Import just fine into PrE - no additional JPEG compression, and hence no additional Image degradation from the JPEG format.
I will Scale to exactly what I need for my Video, though some like to "round up" a bit, hence the common suggestions to Scale to 1000 x 750 pixels (for SD Video), or 2000 x 1500 (for HD Video). Unless I need to Pan on a Zoomed out Still Image, I just go with the exact Frame Size for my Video Project. For the use of larger Still Images (for the Pans), I just calculate the exact size that I require and Scale that/those Image(s) to that exact size.
Hope that this helps, and also note that extreme Scaling, even down-Scaling, will degrade the Image some, though less, than if one up-Scales to larger.
Good luck,
Hunt