Font Frustration

rman wrote on 5/3/2006, 4:14 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

Grazie wrote on 5/3/2006, 4:34 PM
Interesting file server name? "FILEUPYOURS" .. new one on me? - G
rman wrote on 5/3/2006, 4:40 PM
New to me as well. I just googled for a free place to store my files so that I could post them on a forum. I picked the first one I saw that was free and open to the public. I hope it doesn't offend people.
rman wrote on 5/3/2006, 5:55 PM
Probably because they are totally frustrated when they post they problem, and are not confident that all people who could help them on that problem will be reading in one forum or another and therefore, decide to do both.
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/3/2006, 9:29 PM
"why is it that people feel they need to double post" well, if you need an answer, and you can go to 5 groups of people that deal with parts or the whole of your potential problem, you'd be an idiot to only go to one.

Dave
rman wrote on 5/4/2006, 11:17 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.
Spot|DSE wrote on 5/4/2006, 11:42 AM
It's not a bug. First, what are your preview settings in DVD A?
Second, have you previewed from DVD A out to an external monitor?
DVD A scales the media according to screensize. You won't see any *finished* output difference from DVD A 2 or DVD A 3 if all things are equal in both cases. Output the file from Vegas 6 to either version of DVD A and if there are any differences, it's this scaling causing the problem that you see in preview (only)
Just like Vegas, there are options for preview quality. Drag your DVD A layout so the preview window is the only thing on one desktop, you'll likely notice that the fonts change in quality as well.
Additionally, if you're rendering from Vegas to MPEG format, then DVD A won't even touch the files unless you've created an illegal mpeg,
ScottW wrote on 5/4/2006, 4:38 PM
Spot, I don't believe it's correct to say that DVDA won't touch the file if it was rendered as mpeg. As this is a background video for a menu, all someone has to do it put a button on the menu and DVDA must decompress the mpeg, merge the background and the button picture and then compress a new mpeg stream. In theory if all that was done was to create a mask (and the button was placed on the backgound in Vegas), then DVDA wouldn't have to re-render the mpeg; however, I know with 2.0 that it did re-render regardless; I can't recall if this behaviour changed for 3.0.
rman wrote on 5/6/2006, 9:25 AM
Hi Spot,

I can't figure out how to even check my Preview settings for DVDA. I can see how to set it for an external monitor, but I don't see a pull-down, like in vegas that shows "Preview Auto, Preview Full, Good Auto...." Where do I look for preview settings?

I do see what you mean regarding the preview quality, and I'm going to set up external preview as well.

From what I've found Scott, you are correct on DVDA rerendering the menus if you stick almost anything on the screen inside dvda. Not sure there is a way around that but I think I'm OK with it.

I am happy to say that after uninstalling DVDA3 & reinstalling, that my font jaggies are gone. So I'm jazzed about that.

Thanks people. -Rick