DVD Menu Authoring is Seriously Flawed

FRRjak wrote on 12/3/2005, 7:53 PM

The quality of my menu backgrounds in DVDA is just completely unacceptable and a week of playing around with "Optimize DVD" and chanigng the bitrates has gotten me nowhere.

I've output a couple of TGAs from Photoshop of white text with alpha. I used one in a menu (outputting as MPEG-2, DV, or Uncompressed makes absolutely no difference) that gets recompressed (because there are buttons on it) and no matter what, the aliasing is just horrible. If I take an almost identical file as a *movie*, render it as an MPEG-2 NTSC DVDA Video Stream, and it doesn't get recompressed, it looks perfect.

The problem here is that somehow DVDA is not rendering menus at the best quality possible, and it's absolutely nothing to do with bitrate.

Take a look at these outputs of the burned disc in WinDVD:

MENU (640x480 from WinDVD - looks terrible): http://foldingrain.com/images/Menu_BAD.jpg

MOVIE (640x480 from WinDVD - looks great):
http://foldingrain.com/images/Movie_GOOD.jpg

I'm posting the TGA files I used in Vegas to create these two little movies. If you can get one of them to render as a menu background and look crisp, I'd love to know how you did it:

http://foldingrain.com/images/MENU.tga
http://foldingrain.com/images/MOVIE.tga

The same exact workflow in Sonic or iDVD results in *perfect* looking menus, so I know it's not the source graphic, or the movie files rendered out of Vegas.

ONE LAST NOTE: I've noticed when you look at "Preview DVD", when you choose "High" preview quality, you get EXACTLY what DVDA puts out on disc, which is terrible aliasing. When you choose "Best" quality, you get what DVDA SHOULD put on disc but doesn't, which is nice crisp anti-aliasing. I wish there was a way to tell DVDA to to recompress at "Best" rather than "High" when you go to actually burn a disc (again..can't re-iterate this strongly enough...it has absolutely zero to do with bitrate, or progressive vs. interlaced rendering...I think I've proved conclusively that DVDA is stuck in an intermediate quality disc burning quality which cannot currently be changed.. I've tried every kind of bitrate combination possible and the output is always *precisely* the same).

Comments

doobit wrote on 12/6/2005, 2:00 PM

Whether as a background graphic, forground graphic, or a button, it didn't matter for me. I converted your .tga files to .psd files and they rendered as sharp text in DVDA 3.0c no matter where I placed them. How I sized them did make a difference, but not much. The closer I kept them to the original aspect ratio, the sharper they rendered. If I distorted them a little, then they lost a little sharpness, but again, not much. If I left them as.tga and dragged the edges until they filled the screen, then they were not sharp anymore. The reason, I think, is that they were resized beyond their original dimensions. The full frame in DVDA is 720x480 rectangular pixels, but your graphics are 720x480 square pixels and the targa alpha channel is not truly transparent. Try using .psd files at 720x534 and see if you don't notice a difference. Also, make sure you are not trying to render pure white as your letter color. Knock it down to 235 or 240 from 255.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 12/6/2005, 6:21 PM

are you sure it's not the issue that was addressed in the latest DVDA 3 upgrade? You never posted what version you're using. Here's the quote from the current readme file:

An Enable progressive render of DVD menus check box has been added to the General tab of the Preferences dialog:

When the check box is selected, all noncompliant menus in your project will be rendered as progressive-scan video.

When the check box is cleared, all noncompliant menus in your project will be rendered as interlaced video.

If you use a background video in your menus, we recommend rendering the video in progressive-scan format before adding it to your project and leaving the Enable progressive render of DVD menus check box selected. Progressive-scan menus will provide the sharpest-looking text and highest level of DVD player compatibility.
Note: Some DVD players will not display the last frame of a menu correctly when using interlaced background video.

If you change the setting of this check box after preparing your project, the change will not take effect until you clear the Enable smart prepare check box.

FRRjak wrote on 12/8/2005, 8:18 AM

Can you post screenshots?

Thanks for the help :)

Logan5 wrote on 11/2/2006, 10:29 PM

Thanks TheHappyFriar! Your post save the day.