Did you render back out to DV or something more compressed, and at what quality settings? What colors for the text?

Fully saturated red for example might be a poor choice for text, given the limitations of 4:1:1 DV. Very highly compressed winmedia and similar can also do as you described.

The project was rendered as an AVI and placed in a WindowsMediaPlayer play list so that they would loop and play on a 20" Plasma Flat as a Kiosk display of sorts. 5 clips, 30 seconds each. They looked really bad compared to the MPEGS that were also placed on the playlist. They looked 'FUZZY' and the text was unreadable.

Project:
NTSC DV (720x480, 29.970 fps) rendered at the same
NTSC Square Pixel (640x480, 29.970 fps) rendered at the same
NTSC Cropped (704x480, 29.970 fps) rendered at the same
Simple white ARIAL text rendered at GOOD & BEST settings.

I also tried 'Reduce Interlace Flicker' & 'Force Resample'.

Any Thoughts? If I can pull this off it will open up a lot of work for my department because my boss wants to utilize the skills that we already have in our office. He is gonna build a mini Production/Post studio. I will be the main editor if I can convince him with these clips that VEGAS is a viable solution. Doesn't hurt that I already own and know how to use the software.

Once again... is there a certain setting that I should be using for Full Frame / Full Resolution video?

Thanks in Advance!
Lamont

From what I gather your means of playback will only be PC? If so try Quick Time as the playback is smooth and quality can be most excellant. You can also try rendering to DVD Quality Mpegs and use PowerDVD for playback.

Overall I have never gotten good results when playing back DV files with windows media player. You could also try this, it is a little hack type of thing - try rendering all of your files as a SVCD. Than make an ASX playlist for the Windows media player to read the SVCD. If there is not too much movement the SVCD encoded file should be good quality and play 'perfect' on the PC at full screen.

The ".asx" file would look something like this -

<ASX version = "3.0">

<TITLE>The Lamont project</TITLE>
<AUTHOR>Lamont</AUTHOR>
<COPYRIGHT>© 2003 Lamont</COPYRIGHT>
<ABSTRACT>For more on Lamont</ABSTRACT>
<MOREINFO HREF = "http://www.lamont.biz" />

<ENTRY>
<TITLE>FBI Warning</TITLE>
<AUTHOR>Lamont</AUTHOR>
<COPYRIGHT>© 2003 Lamont</COPYRIGHT>
<DURATION VALUE="00:09:34" />
<REF HREF = "MPEGAV/avseq01.dat" />
</ENTRY>

<ENTRY>
<TITLE>Spot 1</TITLE>
<AUTHOR>Lamont</AUTHOR>
<COPYRIGHT>© 2003 Lamont</COPYRIGHT>
<DURATION VALUE="01:55:62" />
<REF HREF = "MPEGAV/avseq02.dat" />
</ENTRY>

<ENTRY>
<TITLE>Spot 2</TITLE>
<AUTHOR>Lamont</AUTHOR>
<COPYRIGHT>© 2003 Lamont</COPYRIGHT>
<DURATION VALUE="05:59:01" />
<REF HREF = "MPEGAV/avseq03.dat" />
</ENTRY>

</ASX>

And you would just add a new entry for each 'chapter'. Give it a try and see if it works for you.

DV is not the AVi of choice for computer only viewing. It is interlaced normally and requires a lot of horspower to play smoothly. Use either quicktime, or match the MPEG settings of the other videos that are played on the Kiosk.

Dave T2