Digital Camera Stills To SVCD

[Amit]

Hi,

First of all Happy Holidays to all of you.

I have a simple question. But first let me give you some background of the setup I am using:

Here's what I am doing:

1) Take pictures with Digital Camera and transfer them to HDD. These are JPG pictures not RAW.
2) Open the pictures/stills in Adobe Photoshop 7 and resize them to 720 X 536 to take care of non-square pixel aspect ratio.
3) Using Adobe Premiere 6.5, import all the stills into a project.
4) Arrange the stills on the timeline in the order I like, add some transitions and background music on the timeline too.
5) In the project settings, use Mainconcept DV Codec with aspect ratio set to 0.9. I am also using Relatime NTSC DV Project Preset settings.
6) Frameserve from the timeline directly to DVD2SVCD to make the SVCD.

WHAT's HAPPENING:
The resultant SVCD made using the above process has color problem. My pictures have burned. In other words, where there was details in the original picture now they changed to white/black and I am lossing details.

MY GUESS:
I know the JPG is using RGB colors space with 0-255 levels for PC/print but for TV we have only 16-240 levels. My guess is this color space conversion is causing the problem.

QUESTION:
What else do I need to do to fix the problem? I would like to correct my pictures in Adobe Photoshop 7 before importing them into Adobe Premiere 6.5 so that I can create/record an action which I can batch run on all my pictures to fix them quickly.

Does anyone know of any FREEWARE command/action for Adobe Photoshop 7 that will fix the pictures for me properly. If not, can you tell me the process to do it manually. Maybe I can come up with an action.

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks
-Amit

[communist]

Use the Photoshops Actions. Open up one picture and start your Action recording. Then apply all adjusments (or adj. layers) - flatten your image and Save it back. Then stop this action and run it on all other pics via File -> Automate. Choose source, destination and Action to run and give him a few minutes.

Since this whole Automate thingy is a bit tricky I suggest you do some trial & error and check how the system works so you dont end up doing it all manually ;)

[Amit]

@communist
What I want to know is what should I do extra after setting the picture to my taste so that it looks the same on the TV screen? In my post I am assuming the picture is already adjusted to my taste and now I want a process to convert it into a SVCD so that I can see it on the TV.

Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks
-Amit

[communist]

Try following adjustments:
Levels / Curves. Also try to reduce Saturation with Hue/Saturation adj. layer.

Since I dont create SVCD and especially not from pictures I can only guess how to 'fix' your pictures. But 'burned' look reminds me of above mentioned things.