Change in quality of pictures with Windows Movie Maker?

Question

The still pictures I put into my Windows Movie Maker project clearly have lost significant quality and a little color (less vibrant). When they are first transferred from the camera, I can open the file and they look excellent, and when I click "properties" on the same pictures in the Windows Movie Maker trays, they have the exact same size/dimensions, etc. But when I play them back, the quality is significantly diminished. I notice the same problem even after saving the movie as a video clip (and watch it on my computer), or then on my DVD player (Xbox 360). If I simply hook up my camera directly to my TV, the quality is great, but I want to make the pics and video into a movie with a soundtrack and everything without the quality turning to junk. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? I had the same results saving as either a WMV file (DV-AVI NTSC) and high quality video (NTSC), which is a "video file". Both give me the same results.

Please help! I've spent days on this project.

Answer 1

The website which will answer ALL your questions about MovieMaker is :-

http://www.papajohn.org/  

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Answer 2

the quality of still pictures in a video is related to the quality of the video itself. The bitrate needst to be 7mb per second, this is the optimum quality setting for a DVD. When you bring in your photo or image, it's important how that image was created. Was it a 720 x 480 pixel image? This is the size of a DVD and if a still image is not that size it will be distorted. Also, still images and photos should be saved at 300 dpi too look good on a  video.