Advice on how to improve the quality of a slideshow.

[avz10]

I made a 21st video for my daughter 2 years ago. It is time again for my 2nd daughter.

I am posting 2 short clips and would like some critical comments on how I can improve on the quality. I have Pinnacle 15. (Reducing the size had a detrimental effect on the quality of the clips)
The examples that I have found on youtube are not that great.
Thanks

https://vimeo.com/44876928

https://vimeo.com/44876929

[audiohominis]

Not a pinnacle user myself but I may be able to offer some general comments.
Since sideshows tend to be fairly low-motion content they are generally a great candidate for high reference frame compression. Again, I don't know anything about Pinnacle Studio but Adobe Media Encoder's implementation of MainConcept's h.264 encoder probably would've been able to do a beautiful job of it.
What format are you encoding to? Was the actual slideshow made in Pinnacle or was it simply imported for encoding? Also, there's something wrong with the frame rates as I notice that the zooming/scaling motion is not smooth at all. You should be mindful of that too.
In PS15's h264 options there should at least be parameters for controlling bitrates, keyframes, and such. Maybe you should play around with those until you get optimal results for the projected file size.

[2Bdecided]

For a start, I'd use HD for uploading to vimeo.

I did something like this back in Pinnacle 10 (I think that was the version!) and it was OK. But I found Sony Vegas HD was better (more powerful, more reliable).

Cheers,
David.