Pictures getting blurry when scaled down in Premiere

Question

I captured some movements on a website to create a howto.
After capturing I edit the clips in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
In premiere the pictures get scaled down to a workable size, however after the scaling the pictures are very blurry, the texts get unreadable and the edges of picture also get messed up.
Which options do I have to set so that Premiere uses the full quality of the pictures?

Answer 1

Well, since these are pictures, try scaling them down in Photoshop before bringing the images into Premiere. You can use the Bicubic method in Photoshop – or you can try the Bicubic (sharper) method, which may produce better results but can also cause 'ringing' artifacts.
If this is a large-ratio reduction (such as resizing a 3000x2000 image to 720x480 or something) you may find, as I have, that you can get better results with the following type of process:
If the image is 8-bits per channel, convert it to 16-bits per channel
apply a sharpening filter, such as Unsharp Mask with fairly strong settings (say, strength=200% ... radius=0.5 ... threshold=4)
scale the image to the desired size using the normal Bicubic method
convert the image to 8-bits per channel
This process can yield a sharper image with less ringing than the Bicubic (sharper) algorithm. The exact amount of sharpening you should apply will depend on the how much smaller than the original you are scaling the image (a larger ratio requires more sharpening). It also will vary with the content of the image, noise, contrast, etc. -- and personal taste.
Once you've found some settings you like, you can set up an action in Photoshop to automate this process a bit.