How To Use V8 to render 1680x1050 wmv into DVD?

ken c wrote on 2/28/2009, 10:32 AM

Hi -

I've got a 90-minute screencapture that's a 1680x1050 1.0square-pixel resolution .wmv file that I need to turn into a DVD... and I need help with the Vegas 8 render settings to get best resolution... any ideas?

It has graphs in it, so I need to keep it sharp, and convert the large .wmv into a 720x480 /.90 standard NTSC res .avi source (or?) to ingest into DVDA, to render a DVD from (eg going from 1680x1050x1 .wmv into 720x480x.9 mpg/vob).

Rendering it as uncompressed avi source makes for way too big of a file (would be 500+gigs I think), for ingestion/conversion from DVDA, so I'm wondering what's the best output format from V8 to use, to turn this large .wmv into something I can import into DVDA, to make DVDs from? It's for a commercial product, and needs to be sharp... (I'm also adding Sony Sharpen/NewBlue filters to sharpen it)...

I'd appreciate any ideas, on how to maintain image quality while converting this, from source .wmv into something to ingest into DVDA for conversion to DVD. I've tested a few alternates, but nothing looks good enough yet, for render settings... any help/ideas?

Thanks,

Ken

p.s. currently I'm doing a test by just ingesting a chunk of the raw .wmv into DVDA, but I suspect it won't be clear enough, hence the need to sharpen it in V8 for final source render, before importing into DVDA.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 2/28/2009, 10:41 AM

If it's going to DVD then it has to be MPEG2. You might as well render it in Vegas. 9Mbps is pushing the limit of what most DVD players can handle, but it should be ok.

Note that 1680x1050 is widescreen 16:9 ratio. You should set your Vegas & DVDA projects as widescreen.

Do you need to use the entire 1680x1050 area all the time? Can you zoom in on a smaller area of the image most of the time? That would go a long way towards maintaining quality. Going from 1680x1050 down to a 480 pixel frame is reducing the size to less than half of the original. That means that every block of 2x2 pixels will get squished into 1 pixel and it's going to look blurry on the fine details such as text and graph lines. Nothing you can do about that if you intend to keep the entire frame.

If you can redo the .wmv file, set your monitor to a much lower resolution like 800x480 while running the presentation. This will much more closely match the DVD resolution and you won't be resizing much at all when rendering.

ken c wrote on 2/28/2009, 11:08 AM

Hi - thanks, great ideas -- hadn't thought about that re temporarily resizing one of the monitors, that's a good way to preview it. Haven't been able to zoom in effectively, but that's worth a try, too -- I appreciate it... it's always a challenge going from one size/format to another, as close to losslessly as possible. Thx for the tips!

I'm also testing, setting V8 project settings as NTSC DVD would be, 720x480 x .09, then choosing "fit to project" in the timeline, which, although that then produces horizontal bars, is at least the same aspect ratio.
-k