Grainy photos in PrE 11 slideshow when burning to DVD. I have read numerous topics but still problem persists. Please help.

Question

Well, the title pretty much says it all. I have an issue concerning grainy pictures.
First, let me give a brief introduction on what kind of project we are dealing with here. As I have been reading these forums for hours for the past days I already have a good understanding of what is of importance, so further details below.
Introduction:
Video editing started to become a real hobby. I learned to edit using Pinnacle studio, but the numerous bugs and flows forced me to try something else. Adobe to me is 'the real deal' and you only learn to use a program like PrE by just doing it! So for this project I thought I might give it a go:
I am editing a video of my uncle's funeral. The funeral has been taped for grandchildren-yet-to-come. All (but one clip) has been filmed using the same camera. However, I do not have access to the camera and I am not the camera man. When music was played during the funeral, the camera was not rolling, so I added this music myself and put a slideshow (which was shown on the day itself) during the music.
During the project I made several quick, medium quality renders to show my cousin (who's dad has passed away) the progress I was making. During these renders, I could not note any photo quality issues. Ofcourse also because of the low quality render settings.
Anyway. When I finished editing I was pretty happy with the end result. My cousin approved so I decided to burn it onto a DVD so it could be further distributed to the rest of the family. Burning failed initially, but later after a reboot everything worked fine. Then I played to DVD on my TV and found out that the quality of the pictures used in the slideshows was horrible. I could not even recognise faces, it was that grainy!
First. The 'specs':
Camera used: Sony DCR55
Project settings: PAL > Hard disk, flash memory camcorders > Widescreen 48kHz (I live in a PAL region: Netherlands)
UNchecked: Force selected Project Settings on this project
Then the photos part:
All photos JPG
So, onto the part of 'what I have already tried' (and failed, otherwise I would not have been typing this)
What I have tried so far after reading dozens of discussions:
1) Check if the DVD burner was not to blame. So I burned to a folder on my HDD. Similar result as to what I see on my TV when I burn it onto a DVD and play it.
2) Recheck project settings. Everything seems OK to me. Also when I use right-click on the added clips to check whether settings are still OK. They are. Also for the pictures, which surprised me because the widescreen video clips use non-square pixels and the photos obviously don't. (Thumbs up for Adobe)
3) Resize pictures to used resolution (720 x 576) before adding them. No improvement, exactly the same.
4) Turn off 'scale to 'framesize'. No difference.
Finally, I want to address the term 'quality'. Below you will find a scaled down image to the same resolution as mentioned before, compared to a still of the DVD:
Upper pic is rescaled using MS paint. Still looks pretty sharp.
Bottom is a still from the DVD file. Note the 'graining' and the horizontal lines.
This leaves me with 2 questions:
1) What can I do to get rid of the poor quality pictures
2) Why do I lose horizontal pixels (as can be seen in the bottom picture)
If anyone could help me, it would be greatly appreciated!!!!!

Answer 1

Dear ATR,
I apologize for my late response. I was on holiday
A.T. Romano schreef:
Question...Your camera is a miniDV camcorder....what did you capture from it and into what....
Did you do a DV data capture firewire into Premiere Elements Capture Window to get DV.avi Widescreen (any mention of Type 1 or Type 2)
or
Did you do HDV data capture firewire into Premiere Elements Capture Window to get HDV (MPEG2.mpg)
From your description of your video (720 x 576) it would seem your captures gave you DV AVI Widescreen. Is that correct?
In your run throughs so far, has the video presented as poorly as the jpegs?
Add On...In those last 3 screenshots, what were the resolutions
Still resized - 1920 x 1080?
DVD-VIDEO  screen capture of video? - 720 x 576 16:9 which would display after encoding about 1054 x 576
MP4 - ?
First. The camera is not a miniDV camcorder, but a harddisk recorder, which is why I chose that particular preset (PAL > Hard disk, flash memory camcorders > Widescreen 48kHz). source: http://www.sony.lv/support/en/content/cnt-specs/DCR-SR55E/list
So it's fairly easy. Shoot video's. Connect to PC and just copy paste the video files of the camera onto the computer.
This gives a resolution of 720x576. With a pixel aspect ratio of 1,4587 (as shown by PrE, when I click on a clip > show properties)
The video does not really look that bad. Actually there is hardly any noticeable difference between the original un-editted videos and the edited complete version.
Concerning the 3 screenshots.
The first is the same as before: a rescaled image using MS Paint. Scaled from original 3264 x 1836 to 1024 x 576
The second is a capture from the DVD file (which was burned to a folder)
The third is a capture from a created MP4 video file
Clearly photo 1 is the best. Photo 3 is still acceptable to me, but photo 2 (DVD) is unacceptable if you ask me.
Hope this new info helps. Thanks for your efforts so far.