Pixellated stills
 

Can someone offer an explanation (and possibly a solution) to this problem.
I have a presentation made up of video interspersed with stills and titles. It looks great on my computer, or on a standard TV. Today, for the first time, I projected it onto a large screen, the kind you use for a slide show. This is how it will ultimately be shown. It is on a DVD in MPEG format.
The video clips look fine, but the stills and titles are heavily pixellated. I can't imagine why stills would pixellate, and not the video. Still photos were prepared in Photoshop at 300 dpi on a 720x480 canvas (same as the video) and exported to Premiere as JPEG images. Titles were made with Premiere Pro's titler.
Thanks for any explanations.

A question: how did you create the mpeg for theDVD?

I burned the DVD using inexpensive Sonic DVD burning software. The result is MPEG-2. I was under the impression that MPEG-2 is the default format with all DVD burners.

Correct. What I was wondering is whether the process you used for converting the video on your Premiere timeline into MPEG-2 was the source of your problem.

Did you create the MPEG2 within Premiere, or did the Sonic software do that step? (And if the Sonic software did it, what format did you export out of Premiere that the Sonic program then used as input?)

Also if you exported from Premiere, did you un-check, "Optimize Stills". I have no idea what this does, but I always un-check it....
Jon

From my understand of what I have read, the Optimize Stills checkbox effects how Premiere renders multiple static frames on the timeline. I believe certain codecs allow a frame to be repeated without saving the image data repeatedly. Uncheck if this is not working for the target program. Or it causes Premiere to do that internally, not recalculating the image data, just repeatedly saving the first frame to disk for the duration of the still. (Image you had 15 complex static effects applied to a 5sec still, it would only render the first frame)

In case anyone is interested, I figured out what the problem was. Seems to have something to do with the fact that video doesn't like sharp, contrasty edges. The solution was to decrease whites (in RGB) from 255 to 220, and increase blacks from 0 to 40. Then white on black becomes light gray on dark gray. Adding a feathering effect completed the transition from pixellated to smooth.