In addition to Steve's questions...

What does the menu look like at 1080 in DVDA? IOW are you previewing at less than final rez, & if so anything would look better because of the lower rez, not DVDA.

Steve:

1) Yes... definitely using BluRay settings

2) It's standard menu items and text using fonts that are installed in Windows (although it trashes my graphics logo as well...)

3) No where near 25Gb. Maybe 9 or 10Gb at max.

4) On the optimization page, each of the menus is set to "use default bit rate" which is 25.000.

And MPM:

I have an external preview monitor that is full 1080p. Viewing the project on that monitor and then switching the monitor to my BluRay player. So I'm certain it's completely clean inside DVDA.

Honestly, it looks like the resolution was shrunk down and there was a horrible job of interporating the pixels, then the image was stretched out again. Along what should be a smooth side of a font, there are notches and irregularities, etc. It almost looks like a standard def menu with the text was rasterized and then stretched into an HD menu.

This is consistent (consistently bad...) across several projects. I'm obviously doing something wrong. But I'm doing it on all of the projects. Come to think of it, I typically clone a project for the next project. So I'm perpetrating the error. I may try starting completely from scratch and recreating the entire project as painful as that is going to be.

But any other suggestions are very welcome at this point.

I guess I can assume that others are not seeing this same problem, correct?

Thanks.

Wow! Sorry, 2G. But I've not seen anything like text getting "trashed". But it's not obvious what's going on either. Hmm.

"Honestly, it looks like the resolution was shrunk down and there was a horrible job of interporating the pixels, then the image was stretched out again."

That may well be what's happening. There were occasional, similar complaints with plain ol' DVD menus before Blu Ray hit the scene -- you should be able to find the threads by searching. Of course DVDs are/were much easier to check out on your hard drive -- as yet there aren't dozens of BD apps & utilities. :(

Anyway, DVDA, like P/Shop, Word, & several other apps stores some historical data in its saved project files... again something that's been talked about from time to time. Your project file may very well be causing the problem -- one way to find out would be just with a simple test menu page, so you might at least cut down on the work necessary to troubleshoot. After saving your project under a new name, insert the test menu, delete most everything else, & render to hdd -- if necessary then do the same in a brand new project (with essentially just the test menu). If your project file's at fault, the new menu should look nasty in 1, great in the other.

The reason I suggest a newly designed/created test menu is that there may be something wrong with the menu graphics you're using, & this would tell you that -- & if the project file is indeed bad, you might even get away with just having your existing menu data saved under a new name in the existing project which could save a bit of work. OTOH if the new menu looks equally bad, even in a new project, there's a problem with DVDA or something in your Windows install is effecting how it works.

Thanks. I'm going to head down that path. But I'm first going to the store to buy a rewriteable BluRay... I'm tired of burning through the spindles of single-use BluRays trying to figure this one out... :-(

It may be a bit premature since it's still just a theory... but if it is indeed something stored in the recesses of an old DVDA project that I can't get to or correct, wouldn't that fall in the category of a bug with DVDA?

I'll let you know...

Thanks again.

Well, I've made progress... But the explanation is above my paygrade...

First, I tried a completely, absolutely brand new project from scratch taking all the defaults... No change.

I tried creating a video file of the menu background, text, and logo. I put it as the menu background. Surprisingly, it looked much better. But then I noticed that when I clicked an item on the menu, even with the video background, it went jagged again just for a brief instant. And finally, I noticed a couple of times when the original static menu came up that it was clean for an instant, then went trashy. In looking closer at the logo graphic, I began to think it may have something to do with interlacing. I watched closely as the picture did the brief transition from good to bad or bad to good, and realized the player was freezing on one field of the interlaced picture.

I can understand why it might freeze on one field when I click a button and it's preparing to jump to another video. But I'm at a loss why it permanently freezes on a half-field on a static menu.

My first thought was that I simply had a cheap BluRay player (which I do). But my family BluRay player is an expensive Samsung, and it does the same thing on it. I also tried it on my computer based BluRay player that came with the burner. Same thing as well. So it's either built into the architecture of all BluRay players, or for some inexplicable reason, DVDA is putting something into the stream telling the player to do that.

So... to prove my theory, I went into the DVDA project properties and changed the default project frame rate from 29.970 interlaced to 24.000 progressive.... voila... good menus.

I noted that the menus are 100% static. Absolutely nothing changes on them. I suspect if I put a motion menu item thumbnail on it, it would fix it as well. It appears that since there is absolutely no movement on the video either DVDA or the BluRay players decide they can go to sleep and freeze the frame. But they are freezing on half of the interlaced frame.

I'm pretty sure I have a handle now on WHAT is happening... Anybody want to take a shot at explaining why this is a 'feature' that I would want on a BluRay menu?

Interesting.

If you look in the DVDA manual you will see that when rendering menus for DVD the recommendation is to render them as progressive because of the deficiencies of some players (only showing one field, just like you have found). In the later versions of DVDA there was a preference that would take care of this for you, rendering all menus as progressive unless you specifically chose not to do so.

But according to the manual, this is not possible on Bluray - "Menus must match the field order set by your project's video format". So it looks like some BD players (including your two) still have problems with interlaced menus even though there is no way to force progressive menus on an otherwise interlaced disc as you can with DVDs.

Not good. And I'm not sure there is much you'll be able to do about it. Perhaps if these menus are really static you could set them to loop - maybe that would hide the frozen-on-one-field effect?

Mark