Font Fracked!

rman wrote on 5/3/2006, 4:19 PM

Using Vegas, I created the following project which has Titles for a DVDA menu, in the veggie below.

http://www.fileupyours.com/files/35346/DVDMenuBadFont.veg

I rendered with using the DVDA NTSC Video Stream, and my fonts look like crap when I pull the mpg into DVDA. I feel like I must be doing something wrong here. Surely this can't be the best one can do with fonts for DV.

I pulled out my Nikon N70 and took a quick snapshot of the preview window, (in Auto-Preview) mode. Then I took a picture how the DVD looks on my T.V. after rendering progressive mode, best quality, etc. as per all of the instructions here. I can't help but think something is terribly wrong....

Check out these two photos here:

http://www.fileupyours.com/files/35346/MyPCMonitor.jpg

http://www.fileupyours.com/files/35346/MyTV.jpg

I wondered if it was my pc, so I saved the project on to my laptop and rendered it from Vegas on my laptop. What I've noticed is that the Vegas-rendered video looks great (I've opened it in Windows Media player and it looks wonderful), but as soon as I pull it into DVDA, it is awful. And I mean it looks awful right ON THE SCREEN OF DVDA before I choose to render/prepare my DVD. What I see on screen in DVDA, once I set the background video to the redendered mpg, is actually what I'm getting on the DVD as the final product, but it looks terrible.

I started playing with DVDA's fonts, and I noticed that if I used the same font as in Vegas, and then overlayed text objects on top of the video so that the words lined up, that my font looked better. It looks like the problem is the Outline that I'm using in vegas. So what I want to know is, is it just plain bad practice to use the Font Outline option in Vegas for a menu that's going to be used in DVDA, or am i doing something wrong? (Why would Sony/sonic foundry give us the option of doing a font outline if it would look like garbage on the DVD?)

Comments

ScottW wrote on 5/3/2006, 5:46 PM

Don't feed DVDA mpg files for your menu backgound - in almost all cases it must re-render the mpg file which results in various problems, some of which you could be encountering.

Render your menu background from Vegas as uncompressed AVI - yes, it will be large, but don't render as DV AVI because that has it's own set of problems.

Alternatively, don't put your titles in your backgound via Vegas, just do them in DVDA.

--Scott

rman wrote on 5/3/2006, 5:53 PM

I totally tried the uncompress AVI way as well, and I got the same result.

I guess I'm just going to do all of my titling in DVDA.

What I can't figure out is why I've read about several people creating their titling in Vegas and then pulling into DVDA. Totally dumbfounded by it as it seems I read about people recommending just that so that you could get better fonts, etc.

rman wrote on 5/4/2006, 11:16 AM

I did several tests, and what I've found with my font problem, is that it doesn't occur at all in Vegas 5.0d. My media looks good from the DVDA2 preview window, and it renders/prepares to DVD just find and looks good when I play the DVD. The problem gets created when I render from Vegas 6 and put it into DVDA3.

Any suggestions here on settings that I might be missing on Vegas 6.0d/DVD3.0c, or anyone else experience this? Or do is this just a bug that I've found. I can't believe nobody else had noticed this.

ScottW wrote on 5/4/2006, 4:44 PM

What render settings are you using in Vegas? I find that rendering progressive from Vegas results in terrible looking stuff in DVDA. You may also want to try changing the preferences in DVDA from rendering the menu progressive to rendering interlaced (this is one thing that did change from 2.0 to 3.0) - go to options/preferences and clear the check on the "enable progressive render of DVD menus"

rman wrote on 5/6/2006, 9:00 AM

I have been trying Progressive and interlaced lower field first. I am getting conflicting advice regarding rendering from Vegas as some have said that if you are rendering a menu form vegas, to ALWAYS render progressive. I guess this is something I'll have to try on my own but it puzzles me that there is not a general consensus on this and that there are so many differing opinions. To me this seems black & white sort of subject.

Anyway, I ended up uninstalling DVDA 3, then reinstalling it and the update/patch, and now everything looks fine.

Thanks for your help Scott. I will try all of your suggestions and see what are the best results. -Rick