Burning a VCD- Washed out whites
 

Hi all,
As a Mother's Day gift to my wife, I decided to take all of those photos of the kids and make a video montage. I had figured that the biggest obsticle would be compatability of our DVD player to play a VCD. I was wrong.

As is the case with many home photos, some were too dark, while others were too bright. Few were just right. So, I just took them into Photoshop and fixed them. They looked fine on the monitor, but while playing the CD, most of them were just bright smears of white on the TV. I tried taking the avi into Premier and adjusting the levels again, with much the same results. Where am I going wrong?
Thanks,
Keith

What software did you use to make the "slideshow" and create
the MPEG file for VCD burning? Personally, I've never seen this
problem.

I used Premiere to assemble it into an avi, then Nero encoded it and burned the disk.

Try another mpeg encoder... see if it works. You can try a demo
out first it you want. Just to check things

Do you think that the encoding is the problem? Even on the PC the video looks ok.

That is a bit strange indeed. Your player does play other
VCD titles okay? If not, perhaps the nero encoder is not
100% VCD compliant (would be weird though).

That is wierd. I've made a VCD using Nero, with footage from my old Sony trv120e digital 8 camera and it came out really good. Maybe it's premiere.

I haven't tried any other VCDs in the player, this was my first. It normally plays DVDs fine. Now that I think about it, I played a DVD the other day that was washed out in parts too. I figured it was because Jay and Silent Bob aren't a big production. Hmmmm...

Jay and Silent Bob is a pretty big production.... If I were you I'd
check your DVD player. Can you get your hands on any other
VCD's? Perhaps from a friend or rental store. Especially since
it looks good on your computer it looks like your DVD Player
is going about it the wrong way. What kind of player do you have?

The DVD is an Apex AD 500 WM. It works fine with all of the other DVDs we've played, with a great picture. Just my VCD and the Clerks animated DVD are freaking out. The only places Jay and S. Bob wash out are the live segments, the animation looked good.

I did the VCD several times, on two different machines. I used the same programs, more or less. I only have Photoshop LE on the edit machine, aside from that I used Premier 6 and Nero 5.5 demo. Both machines had the same result. I tried again, and lowered the levels with reckless abandon. This resulted in a greyed out look, with a few of the images still looking washed out.

I am begining to think that this is one of those projects that the fates are out to ruin. Thanks for all of the input and suggestions, I will give them a try.
Keith

VCD creation shouldn't be this difficult. Keep in mind though, that
Apex is a low-quality-pricing brand (no offense to anyone), it
isn't a top of the line product! Although I've never heard any of
this with these players it does keep me wondering. Things to
try out are:

1. Encode your mpeg with another mpeg encoder. Use a demo
of Xing, Ligos, Cinemcraft ot TMpgenc.
2. Play it back on a friends DVD player (other than Apex), see
what it does.
3. Go to a DVD store and indicate that you are interested in
buying a DVD Player. But since you create your own VCD,
you want to make sure the players play them well (ofcourse
you've brought along your own disc!). They will let you play
it and you can see the disc on wide variety of players this
way.

Good luck!