Pics on DVD running on 42"HDTV are grainy

FJRPierreFJRPierre Registered Users Posts: 5 Beginner grinner
edited July 7, 2007 in The Big Picture
Son came back from holiday, put his pics (various camaras 3-8Megapix) on DVD and showed them on our new 42 " plasma HDTV through a progressive scan DVD player. On HDTV the large majority of them are grainy although a very few (portrait oriented) seem to "refresh" to an acceptable picture. The same DVD/pics on a computer monitor are not grainy. Played with all the TV and DVD settings but no joy. What's the secret?

thanks

Pierre

Comments

  • RichardRichard Administrators, Vanilla Admin Posts: 19,962 moderator
    edited July 7, 2007
    If you step back far enough from the tv, it probably won't look as bad. The number of pixels in each pic is constant. They are much smaller on a computer monitor than on a wide screen TV, so the image appears to be smoother. You can see this clearly if you enlarge the pics to, say, 300% on your computer. Smooth colors now appear to be chunky blocks. Something similar is happening on yout TV because the size is so much greater.

    Regards,
    My Pics
  • zackerzacker Registered Users Posts: 451 Major grins
    edited July 7, 2007
    i have this same thing with dvd video.. ill shoot a video with my sony miniDV cam, DL to my comp and burn it on a dvd..then, ill stick the DVD into the player to watch on TV and it looks so bad i wont even waste the time to watch it... I cant figure it out and no one else seems to know, even the owners manual wont help so now i have to watch all my movies on the computer or played on the tv through the camera!
    http://www.brokenfencephotography.com :D

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    Visit us at: www.northeastfoto.com a forum for northeastern USA Photogs to meet. :wink

    Canon 30D, some lenses and stuff... I think im tired or something, i have a hard time concentrating.. hey look, a birdie!:clap
  • colourboxcolourbox Registered Users Posts: 2,095 Major grins
    edited July 7, 2007
    There are two kinds of DVDs.
    1: Computer data DVD, which requires a computer to read
    2: Digital video DVD, which can be played in a consumer DVD player, like a movie

    If you are burning a DVD that can be played in a DVD player, it is DVD-Video. The problem with DVD-video is that its resolution tops out at 720×480 for NTSC. That is all you get. It doesn't matter whether you put a 10-megapixel file into your DVD-videodisc burning program. To conform to the DVD-video format to be playable in your grandma's DVD player, it must be downsampled to 720×480, which is 0.345 megapixels.

    Essentially, you are watching Standard Definition 720×480 video on an High Definition monitor, and so your content naturally falls well short of the monitor's capabilities. To play back content that would take full advantage of the monitor, you would need to connect a computer to the HDTV so that you can play back a data DVD, where you can store full resolution JPEGs; or burn your discs to HD-DVD/Blu-Ray using the proper disc burner, which is still expensive at the moment. Not to mention everyone you send it to would have to have HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players to play it back.

    It's the same with video files. Standard-definition miniDV camcorder footage will be 720×480, on your HDTV which may be capable of 1080 or 1920 lines per inch. If you want your video to match the capabilities of your HD monitor, you must shoot it using one of the new HD video cameras.

    Even if you put high-resolution images on a data DVD and connect a computer to the TV, you must do it right, via DVI/HDMI and select the proper output resolution in your OS display prefs, in order to get full resolution. Better video cards and laptops have DVI. If you connect a laptop via SVGA or Composite RGB, resolution will be 720x480 or worse.

    It's a classic production pipeline problem. You want high resolution, so every link in the chain has to support it, but they all don't, so you lose most of your resolution before you get to the final output device, the monitor. In a few years, when HD burners and cameras are as cheap as SD equipment is today, this won't be a problem anymore.

    I don't know how the TVs work that have flash card readers built in, but I imagine they might be able to show full resolution.
  • FJRPierreFJRPierre Registered Users Posts: 5 Beginner grinner
    edited July 7, 2007
    Thanks for all your comments

    Here's what we did to fix our picture problem.
    Original source - JPGs taken with a 7 MP Canon - 2-5Mb JPGs.

    Problem: images showed up as grainy, and much worse than images taken
    by an older 3MP Canon that had images on the same disk. Disk: DVD with
    JPG files, being played on a non-HD DVD player output to an HDTV,

    Popping in another photo CD (Pashnit Screensavers) that we had, after seeing how clear 1000x750 pixel images displayed on the HDTV, it seemed like the source files were just too big for the nonHD DVD to deal with- maybe some combo of the DVD having to downscale the picture, and the HD upscaling it were contributing to the graininess?

    Solution:
    Used Picasa to export the original photos, at a max resolution of
    1200 pixels to a new folder, and used this to burn a new Data DVD.
    This cut the JPG image size down to about 200kb/image, and left the
    DVD player able to read the photos faster, and have less processing
    work to do before it output it to the HDTV.

    Yay! Images for both cameras scale up to the HDTV well. No graininess. I guess that we optimized down to the size of pic the pipe would handle.
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