Still jpg photos are blurry in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4

Question

Hi everyone,
Please help!  I am somewhat new to Adobe Premiere Pro and have been pretty much self-taught.  I recently put together a wedding video for a friend and added in some still images.  For the life of me, I cannot figure out why when I export the video, the images come up blurry.  I've tried everything--deinterlace, do a frame hold on each of the pictures (on the in point), etc.  I would really appreciate any advice about this--maybe I'm missing something obvious?  I've attached a screen shot of what a typical image looks like once I've exported the video.  Thanks in advance!
-E

Answer 1

Hi -E,
From your last post, it sounds like you have a solution with the different output selection, but if you are still curious, I'm confused by your quoted settings.
<<Export Settings: Video Codec is set to Animation, 29.97 fps, NO optimize stills, 720 x 477 (same as video input size)
Video Footage: Sony Camera, MiniDV tapes, Widescreen SD>>
MiniDV tapes implies that your video is in SD format, 720x480 (which is sort of implied in your Export settings).
Widescreen SD implies that you are aiming to get the output to SD in a 16:9 format, 854x480
Your posted photos look stretched and if you are happy with the video, then I suggest that CS4 is converting the video to Widescreen without distortion and stretching your photos to Widescreen without converting them (i.e. keeping the same number of pixels and just stretching them to the new size).  If you want to try another experiment, either crop or convert your photos before importing them to CS4 so that they are  854x480 and then just produce your video the way that you were doing when your troubles started.
I had HDV video, which comes in at 1440x1080.  To add photos, I cropped my hi res photos to 3840x2160 ( i.e. 2 times 1920x1080), resized the result 50% to 1920x1080 and then imported them.  In Encore I requested SD output (720x480) and the result was undistorted.  So CS4 was happy to rescale the video differently to the stills.  This experience is why I suggest using Widescreen aspect ratio for the photos.   Like you I am self taught and for myself, not good at absorbing the info in the manuals.  Another video software suite I used to use would also exibit Pixel Aspect Ratio problems.  If you took a frame of video and exported it as a still, then reimported it, the result would be blurry.  It turned out that sure enough, it would export the picture as a crisp 720x480 image, and because of the pixel aspect ratio of standard DV being 0.9091, it needed 720x534 for stills being imported. If I took the ouput stretched it to 534 and re-inserted it, you could not distinguish the video from the still.  A royal pain at the time.
Anyway enough rambling.  Worth a try if your new found si=olution gets you  out of a jam but you aren't yet trully happy.
Cheers, Ian