Photo Archiving on DVD

I have transferred a number of digitized photos made with a Nikon slide scanner into video burned onto DVD. I use them as still frames mixed in with the video and struggle to keep quality up. Invariably a lot of quality is lost. Among the problems is you can start with an excellent high pixel count computer file of your photo, but creating a MPEG file for a video DVD loses pixels due to compression designed into the DVD system. This shows up most often to me as loss of shadow detail- shadows just go all black. Still pictures displayed on any TV have to have a nominal 30 frames per second. If you want your picture to show for 10 seconds about 300 copies of the same picture are burned onto the DVD.

The fact that you want to display on an HDTV does not get you much since the DVD video standard is a SDTV video format. This is typically equal to a 640x480 pixel still photo. Starting with more pixels in your still will either result in automatic downsizing or may choke the software creating the DVD.

Once true HD DVD burners become available better resolution will be available.

If you mean storing still pictures in a COMPUTER file format on a computer readable DVD, and then using a high quality computer screen projector with software like PowerPoint, I have seen some good slide shows. If you become proficient in the use of Photoshop to adjust contrast, saturation, and levels on the picture file results can be terrific. Quality again suffers from using too much jpeg file compression.

However good projectors are pretty expensive. I have seen some projectors that do double duty- both computer display and TV display. I have seen a couple of cheap ones that were at our church that were very poor picture quality. I am sure if you spend enough you can get a good projector. They are extensively used in business conference rooms, churches and auditoriums today. But this is not your regular HDTV set with a 480p DVD video player.

Thanks for the info Don. You're right, DVD is 480p at best, not HD. I was hoping, though, that the photos could look as nice as some movies do on progressive scan. To clarify, I do want to archive the pics for preservation, but I also want to display them on my tv, and my families tv's which are not HD at the present.

From what I can gather there are two ways to display the pics on tv. First, you can create a "movie" made up of stills. I hadn't thought of that, but I suppose you're right, 300 times for ten seconds. The problem I have with this method is the quality loss from compression you mentioned, plus knowing which format to burn in. There's DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD-ROM. My DVD player will only accept DVD+R, which isn't really standard from what I can gather. If I can I'd like to be able to burn these pics for my use and send them to family, but the formats don't seem to be settled yet.

Second, I've read that some DVD players will display picture files (jpg's) on cd or dvd, but some of them put a cap on maximum pixel size. After scanning my slides are approximately 3900 x 5800 which should look awesome if they aren't compressed. I'd be willing to buy a new DVD player with picture viewing capability if it gives good results, but it would be nice to hear of someone's experience.

Maybe you're right, maybe I should wait for HD DVD.

Thanks again for any comments or thoughts.

Ken

MadeInAlaska...look into the LiteOn LVW-5005 dvd recorder. It uses every format [DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, CD-R, CD-RW] as well as JPEG/MP3 and has cool menu editing capability. I just watched our Halloween party (digital camera to CD-R disk) on my 65" Display. They also have the new LVW-5006 out at radio shack...It's the same unit with an added 3 hr recording mode.

Thanks for the tip on the LiteOn ChuckKen, I'll look into it. Just out of curiosity, what file type are you using on your CD-R? Are they JPG's?

Thanks!

Ken

Chuckken made a good suggestion I was not familiar with. Since I don't have one of these new DVD players I may go beyond my knowledge here, but a few thoughts.

I should be possible to design a DVD player with internal hardware to read jpeg files and display them as a "freeze frame", syncing to the monitor at the required 29.97 frames per second. This might still limit to a 640x 480 pixel resolution. However if they could provide circuits to sync to an HDTV display the 720p frame is 1280 x 720 pixels and the 1080 i and p frames are 1920x 1080 pixels. Still a lot less than the 4000 pixel resolution on some scanners, but pretty good.

Check it out and let us knnow.

Thanks for the tip on the LiteOn ChuckKen, I'll look into it. Just out of curiosity, what file type are you using on your CD-R? Are they JPG's?

Thanks!

Ken

Ken...yes, they are JPEGS...I was astounded at the clarity of the pictures on my 65" display. My wife and I were looking at them on our computer and all of a sudden I remembered that the LiteOn has JPEG capibility so I put the disc into the LiteOn and fired up the 65" Tosh and Man!... looked good!

Cool! That's what I wanted to hear! Anyway I'm still exploring this, and I'll bet I'm not the only one who is. Why drag out an old slide projector and screen when you've got a 65" HD RPTV sitting there?

It looks like Samsung has a new version of its upconvert DVD player coming soon (941?) and I think it's going to play all sorts of formats, including TIFF files. That would be good I think, because there's no compression in the TIFF format like there is in JPEG. Still, I suppose the DVD player is going to perform it's own compression, but I'm not certain if that's true or how it works.

It's been frustrating to research this, because there's not much info available. I suppose that will change, and already is judging by the capabilities of the new DVD players.

Thanks again for your comments!

MadeInAlaska...No problem, the unit was recommended to me on this very forum...below is a link to where I bought mine...(there are some specs to check out)...They have very excellent service. I ordered it on wed and it was at my door Sat...(standard ground shipping).

http://www.compuadds.com/product.asp?prodcode=D-LVW5005

MadeInAlaska: Another option for you to consider. I have a laptop and have connected my HDTV as an external monitor. I can use any slideshow package on my laptop (Media Center, MS Picture Manager, etc) and the pictures display as crisp as ever on the HDTV. If you have Photoshop (or equivalent) and create 1920x1080 versions of your pictures, you will have an awesome, full screen slideshow setup!

I am a photographer with thousands of photos on DVD and at times show them using an HD monitor (Samsung). The simplest route for you (and perhaps the least expensive) may be to invest in a video board for your computer that has high resolution capability along with HDMI output.

With my set-up using an All-In-Wonder X1800XL video board along with an HDMI-Link Digital Extender (switch box) I can capture video from my Directv HD receiver, use Adobe Premier (or Pinacle Studio 9) to edit (take our commercials, etc.) and then output to DVD. The DVD's can be played on the comptuer or in a standard DVD player (granted, not true HD but great quality).

And as to your question, I archive all of my photos on DVD in .jpg format (a 4.7 Gb DVD will hold thousands of photos, depending on the resolution). And with the push of a button on the switch box, my Samsung HD monitor/HD TV can be used to show all of my photos stored on DVD at their original .jpg or .bmp or .tif or .whatever quality. Doing it this way negates the need for multiple images (for the video of a still shot) and any cheap photo display program can replicate that with a "slide show" function (even the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer).

Happy shooting/scanning

The question was can you display those high res images on the HD TV? The answer is one of those "It all depends".
IF you are using a computer with a video card that can match or exceed the resolution of the TV AND has either DVI or HDMI output AND the TV is capable of serving as a monitor as many are, then it's almost plug and play. In which case you should be able to get very good results. Use either a DVI or HDMI cable between the computer and TV. However if you plan on doing thousands of the old family photos you can plan on spending a lot of time in front of the computer. I use the Nikon LS5000ED with the SF210 feeder. Between slides and color negatives I've scanned in over 30,000 images. Other than using ICE (which doesn't work well on most Kodachrome slides) I did very little post processing. All were scanned at the maximum 4000 dpi resolution. If you've scanned many images you know how much time is required per slide. Just multiply that by 30,000.

I would note that a video card that can match the resolution of the good monitors is not inexpensive but they are becoming more reasonable. that also means a computer with a fair amount of horse power.

MadeinAlaska, I am doing exactly what you're talking about. I threw away my Nikkon scanner (the Scuzzi card with it blew my motherboard.....!!!) and bought a Microtek Scanmaker i900. It'll do negatives up to 8x10 and does a superb job of restoring old b&w 620's from 60 and 70 years ago. It will scan up to 12 slides at a time. It also copies reflective material as well. However, as Roger pointed out, converting slides is VERY time consuming. My slides go back as far as the 50s and 60s and while they have been kept in very good conditions, they are certainly not all exposed perfectly and I'd say about 85% of them need some diddling. Enter PhotoShop Elements. Add contrast, fix the color, sharpen ones that need it, crop out grandma's leg - if you're any kind of perfectionist with your pictures, you'll be hooked on making them look even better than when you took 'em. Trust me. I scan them at at least 300% of the original size and at least 400 dpi resolution. If it looks like I might crop it down some, I scan at higher resolution and size. You could crop using the scanner software, but slides are so small it just seems easier to do it after you've blown it up a bit.

Here I depart from some of the others. I don't take stills anymore - I've been doing HDTV since the first consumer camera came out several years ago. I use Sony Vegas Pro 8 and Sony DVD Architect programs to convert the tv to DVDs - ah, soon, HD DVDs, Pro 8 has bluray capabilities - and so I use these two programs to put the slides on a 50" old Pioneer plasma. These two programs are bundled and sold as a package but it is quite expensive and you could do the same thing with Roxio's package and perhaps others less expensive.

What I like about using a movie maker package is that you can add titles, you have the full panoply of transitions (and you can use the ones YOU choose, not some random slide show), you can zoom in on anything of particular interest, you can add music easily and if you wish, even narration. And trust me, making the final "movie" takes far, far less time than scanning all those slides.

I think the downside no matter what you do is that your "portrait" slides are going to be small compared to everything else. And I guess there's just no way around that. When making the movie, I try to lump a few portraits together so I'm not continually jumping from horizontal to vertical and back and forth.

Another thing I've done a bit of is cropping. You'd be surprised how many of your landscape slides can be cropped to 16x9, giving your slide show a more "high def" look. And if you're already diddling each one in Photoshop, it only takes a second to set up a custom 16x9 crop and then only a couple of seconds to crop each one.

Just ideas from an old guy.....

Jerry

+1 to Microtek Scanmaker i900!
In our company we, however, installed the i900 twice. Hoisting this behemoth around is not for everyone. At roughly 25 wide-bodied pounds, it's awkward to pull out of the box and hard to lift.

Although slow, I'd scan at the maximum resolution of your scanner (4,000 dpi) and archive the high res scans to disk or blu-ray, not dvd; these files are large and you'll use up a lot of disk space in a hurry. Blu-ray burners are now around $100 +/-. Then downsize the "originals" for display on a hdtv (1080p or 780p), paying attention to preserving the original aspect ratio of each picture; most photo programs, e.g., Adobe Photoshop Elements, allow resolution reduction by a simple file save.