Imported graphics don't look so good

gidget wrote on 10/14/2004, 6:35 PM
I'm just starting to produce my first project with VMS. I wanted to import a logo I made for a company and I was surprised to see how jaggie it looked. I've tried exporting from Adobe illustrator as PNG & PSD and it still looks crappy. Project specs are only 320x240 for the web. What am I doing something wrong?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/14/2004, 8:24 PM
How large is the graphic that you're exporting? Does it contain harsh color contrasts on diagonal or curved edges?
gidget wrote on 10/15/2004, 1:40 PM
File size is onlly 34K and I made it roughly the same pixel size as my movie. I would not call it hard edges. It's a logo, that looks like a half circle with 3 lines coming up from the center. Company name leading of from the right. Symbol is green and text is white. It's not such a complicated graphic really.
Steve Grisetti wrote on 10/15/2004, 2:02 PM
The resolution for graphics for digital video are more like 655 x 480. Can you produce a JPEG of your graphic at that resolution and give it a try?
Chienworks wrote on 10/15/2004, 2:37 PM
Also make sure you save the file with absolutely minimum compression. 34K for a JPEG file may be squashing it too much and you're seeing compression artifacts. Better yet, use a format like PNG.
gidget wrote on 10/15/2004, 3:43 PM
I can save as JPEG from Illustrator but I don't want a background and the JPEG format brings one in (it's a logo that I want to use as an overlay). I tried with an 800x600 size and also saving as PNG but I still get jaggies (around my curves - straight edges are okay). Am I expecting too much?
gidget wrote on 10/15/2004, 6:36 PM
Well, I did some testing and it seems that I have to turn off fast video resizing. I saved my graphic file as a PNG in many different sizes and resolutions but it only looked great in my video when I turned that feature off.

Turning that off, does it mean it takes longer to render my video?

Another problem that I seem to have is no matter how I resize the graphic in my graphics program it always imports into MS really BIG - and I only need it small and in the corner as an overlay. I tried using pan/crop, but I can't get it small enough and then I can't pan around my screen because the darn thing is too big.

now what????
Chienworks wrote on 10/16/2004, 5:41 AM
One method to make sure you get exactly what you want is to create the graphic in a full size frame just the way you want it first. If you're using NTSC then create a new image file at 654x480 pixels (for PAL use 787x576) with a solid color that doesn't occur anywhere in your logo and paste the logo into that frame at the size & location you want. Now when you import this new file into the video editor it will be in exactly that position.

In order to get the video to show through the background you can use Chroma Key if you have Movie Studio 3 or Vegas Studio 4. A better option would be to save the graphic file with a transparent background. This can be done with GIF, TGA, TIFF, and PSD formats, but not with JPEG or PNG.
gidget wrote on 10/16/2004, 6:12 PM
Thank you very much for that information, that has helped me through this problem. I tried both metheds and they both worked (I saved as PNG as PNG does support transparency). It worked great.

And for Chroma Key - that is something new I've learned and I can think of creative ways to use this.

Thanks again