Photos look grainy

Question

When I add still shots they look really grainy on my PC. Is this normal?
A photo in particular is 1.68MB so it's not like it is small.

Answer 1

I thought Larger was better.
With respect to print work, it is. Using the "way-back machine," I used to shoot everything from full-page up on 8 x 10. Then, I dropped back to 4 x 5. When digitizing my film became an option, I'd always opt for 1000ppi scans as a minimum and just work from monster files. Nowadays, most of my still work is done on a 12 megapixel camera.
Now with Video, we are constrained by the output size. [Similar happened when images were earlier used for Web work. Download times, and the display setups of users of the Internet dictated much smaller images.] If one is outputting to DVD, then either the NTSC, or PAL, sizes become the target. Shooting at the camera's highest possible resolution is still good advice, but one must find the ultimate method to get the images down to usable size.
There are basically two ways to do this (one does have some variations). One can let the NLE do the work. Most are pretty good at this, but there are two problems: NLE's are designed to work with Video and not really to process still images - the quality suffers when resizing; like the bandwidth limitations of large images on the Web, computer resources are directed to processing these large images. Because of the former, I recommend using an image processing program, like PS to do the resizing. They are designed to do just this - handle still images in the best way possible. Also, one is now only processing that one image, not a Video of it, made up of many smaller images. Basically, you're processing one frame and not 30/second of Video. The algorithms used by an image processing program are better, more accurate and more efficient, than those used in an NLE.
If I can achieve better quality and also lower the resource load on my computer, I view this as a win-win situation. As PS (and PSE) has Actions to "script" operations, I can batch process all of my still images in a few brief moments for use in Video. It takes me far longer just editing out the images that I will not use, than it does to process 1000 for use in a Video.
Travel safely, and let me know how the quality looks, when you do the resizing outside of your NLE. Remember too, the Program Monitor in about all NLE's is just an emulation, a preview, if you will, of what that image will look like on a TV. For critical judgement, I strongly suggest doing a DVD RW (if one is going to DVD), and playing on a set-top player, hooked to a TV. If one only views on the Program Monitor of the NLE and on their computer screen, then I strongly recommend that the settings in the Program Monitor be set to High/Highest Quality, not Automatic, and the Magnification be set to 100% and not to Fit. Also, if the NLE indicates that the footage needs to be Rendered (red line above the footage in most NLE's), Render it first. Otherwise, with an un-Rendered Clip, the Program Monitor set to Automatic and Fit, it's a bit like trying to judge the quality of a photograph by looking only at the thumbnail of that photograph. You can only get a rough idea of the content of that photograph and can really make no judgement on its quality.
Good luck,
Hunt