Jayson, thx for the response, but I guess I am already taking into account the drop in resolution to meet a DVD spec. Its at 720x480 that I desire more quality and have seen some productions that just seem to look better than what I have put together.

My production values are as good as I can get with the tools I have, but I can't get over the fact my project has a touch of amateur feel to it. I think if I could improve the quality, this would change.

Are you reviewing the quality on your PC or on a TV?

-Jayson

I am viewing this on a big screen, 65 inch Toshiba from a Pioneer progressive scan dvd player. Both are pretty high end electronics. I mean things look good, I guess I am just trying to get the last bit of quality I can out of this effort.

Have you reviewed your images in the histogram? Calibrated the gamma correctly? What color profile are you using - from the camera or from an editor? Did you correct and balance color in Vegas or a photo editor like Photoshop? Have you removed colors that are illegal for TV - your quality stills will have colors a TV can not reproduce?

You mention none of these things which must be considered for pro quality.

What I usually do to my photos is ensure correct exposure when taking them but it is usually a visual inspection of the photo and not in depth analysis of the histogram.

I then do a post processing of all photos in a photo editor (not vegas) which includes some sharpening, level and midtone adjustment, noise removal and thats about it. I haven't applied a further color correction or gamma adjustment. I haven't applied an NTSC filter either. DO you think these are hurting quality?

"Have you reviewed your images in the histogram? Calibrated the gamma correctly? What color profile are you using - from the camera or from an editor? Did you correct and balance color in Vegas or a photo editor like Photoshop? Have you removed colors that are illegal for TV - your quality stills will have colors a TV can not reproduce?"

You know, these seem like some very good questions. I too, have done some work with Photos and composed a miniture photo album presentation, and I was really looking for some advice on the video side to get the best quality as the original post was. Unfortunately, I have next to no experience on the video side, but know a thing or two about audio, but was looking to expand my video knowledge a bit. So anyways, these seem like some important factor questions.......would you mind answering how you would go about doing each of them? This might seem like trivial steps to a pro video person, but I admitantly will say it sounded like you where speaking a different language when you typed those questions.

Thanks,
Red

One quick thing to check:
Film and digital still media allows for a wider range of colors than NTSC television standards do. In NTSC land, anything under 16 IRE or over 235 IRE is a no-no.

Images with color levels out of these bounds can look fuzzy, distorted, pixellated or other bizarre effects. The easiest way to fix this is to put a "Broadcast Colors" filter in Vegas on the video track (or tracks) that contains your stills. Try this, and see if you see an improvement.

A more precise (but more time-consuming) way to do this is to use the "Levels" adjustment in Photoshop or similar to bring the levels into NTSC spec.

Its seems you're comparing apples to oranges if you're looking at the results of COMMERICALLY MADE DVD's to home brew variety. The entire process is different. I also think your suffering from the very common trap that the grass in greener on the other side the fence.

You need to take into account the HUGE difference between your source material and the format you're rendering to plus the fact you looking at the end result on a over sized TV screen.

If you're done all the steps you can to ensure levels, colors, hue, overall sharpeness etc.. is as it should be, come to accept you can only take it so far. You're only making a DVD for Pete's sake. I suspect you're being much harder on yourself then anyone viewing your work will be. Part of being professional is knowing when you're starting to gild the lilly.

thx to all for the advice. WHile I realize that home cooked dvds can't live up to commercially produced discs, I guess I just want to get my production to the minimum quality that someone would consider forking out a few bucks for. I personally wouldn't buy something that wasn't very well done so its hard to expect the general public. If what I read about Procoder is true and some of the other tweaks some have mentioned, I may have my answer.

Have you tried making and watching a DV tape of the project? This might help you decide if the problem is with the MPEG-2 encoding or is just the result of reducing the resolution. If the DV tape plays better, you can assume that the MPEG-2 encoding is not satisfactory, and can try either increasing the bitrate, or taking a DV tape or hard drive to a copyhouse and having a hardware-based encoding done. Hardware based MPEG-2 encoding is generally of a higher quality than software based encoding.
Also, you ABSOLUTELY need to run a Broadcast Colors filter over your stills. Some televisions are much more picky than others when it comes to colors, and I have a 1991 27" Hitachi that even has trouble AFTER the BC filter has been run. I run EVERYTHING through it before delivery, just in case my customer has a TV as picky. The point of this is that colors outside legal NTSC standards can cause all the wierd things the others posted, as well as a jumpiness that may look like interlace flicker, or ultra-saturated reds and yellows.

Run the filter, try making a DV tape, and THEN you can decide if the problem is with the encoding or not.

Corey

as stated above about color correction, you may need to adjust your colors, hues,etc... for a better picture for "tv" viewing. Also remember to select the proper pixal adjustment ratio.


AJP

You might just try this:

Take your RAW images and put them DIRECTLY into Vegas with no processing. Open the histogram widow and apply the LEVELS filter to remove any out of range areas. Then apply the broadscast colors filter and leave it at that while you render and look at it on the screen. If you feel you maust you can try color correcting or sharpening again using the vegas FX.

Let us know how it looks.

Lots of great suggestions, especially regarding broadcast colors.

If you are not adjusting contrast and brightness, color correcting, and blurring while referencing an NTSC monitor via firewire ouput and real-time conversion to NTSC then you are flying blind. IMO this is the single most important thing you can do (if you're not doing it already).

Agreed. If you are making seat of pants/manual edits by eye while looking at a computer monitor you will not get it right unless you are lucky enough to have your monito calibrated to the TV. Its not difficult to output from Vegas direct to your TV - see the manual. This will be a big help.

This is one reason when I edit in Vegas / Photoshop I use the charts and statistics not my eyes. One thing you can do as an alternative is get a professional sample image you know is good. Watch it on your TV then capture it into Vegas then adjust your monitor setting so it looks like the TV did.

mhbstevens, thanks for the advice. However, I just spent nearly 1 month editng and correcting 650 digital photos for my project. It would be a real pain to go back and have to redo them all again with your suggestion. I have always trusted my eyes when editing and have done some test renders along the way that seemed reasonable.

Is there anything that I can apply now in Vegas to give my project a "failsafe" correction without having to re-edit? By this I mean is there a generic setting in gamma correction or some other track FX that I should consider applying now?

Hi All:

Jumping on this thread:

Is there a broadcast standard for colours for PAL T.V.?

Also: Billyboy: What exactly does 'gild the lily' mean? I've never understood that one!

Cheers,

Andy

Try the procoder approach with the encoder set to mastering.

You will be ammazed at the difference in quality, especially if you use transitions.

Wolfbass, " 'gild the lily' mean? " .. . well, if you've got something as beautiful as a lily, one might think it was at all possible to improve on that beauty. And that to make it even MORE beautiful one could "do" something to it. In this case "gilding" or by the application of the "precious" metal gold might have been thought to "improve" it even further! Irony, gold is heavy and of a totally different substance/material to that of the lily. Attempting to improve using such a different material would only "ruin" that which was perfect before. So, not only gilding the lily would be unnecessary - the lily was perfect - but you could also end up with something that was at best a detraction from the original beauty and at worse a total mess! Indeed how would you go about gilding/appyling Gold to an organic substance like a lily flower anyway? It is a perversion against "nature". IMHO this too is at the heart of the saying. That which is of one substance cannot and more to the point should not be combined - EVEN if it is so desired. I like the saying very much. It is very close to my all time favourite of Mr Picasso - "Less IS More" . . yeah?

.. . there is also, potentially, a "Shakespearean-type" allusion to Gilding as in making the flower of dubious gender - that is in gelding a male horse but HERE the lily which is so descriptive and representational of female anatomy, that to "geld" it would also be a travesty and contrary to nature and all things "natural". These are only my further thoughts.

But there again, due to this long-winded essay, I TOO could be accused of the same .. . and loosing the import, tenure and weight of my own argument. And some how burdening and hobbling the original clear, precise and concise explanation I posited at the commencement of this thesis and eventual discourse just presented . .. . .. etc etc etc . . . "Gilding the Lily" ;-)

Grazie

tygrus,

As I suggested before, try putting the Sony "Broadcast Colors" filter on the appropriate tracks. Or if you're whole project is nothing but stills, put it on the entire project. Be prepared for a fairly lengthy render.

This should be the "failsafe" you're looking for.

I spent last night on another render, this time using the broadcast filter in Vegas set at Lenient 7.5. I didnt know which was the best setting so I just took a chance. This made for a longer render, approx 4 hrs for a 5 minute piece on an AMD 1.4 GHZ machine.

I was able to get it into the demo version of Procoder and got out an m2p file, not an mpeg file which I was expecting. Now I am not sure what to do with it? Should I just rename it and try to put it in my authoring software? I use Ulead DVD Workshop primarily and it wasn't evident that this program takes this file format.

Well I've read most of the posts sorry if I'm going over old ground.
1) Forget about different encoders, you're wasting your time and myabe your money. The only difference is how they handle MOTION. As you're encoding stills and I'd assume they all use pretty much the same algorithm for the ICT you will not see any difference.
2) Forget about BC legal for DVD. The DVD player does that for you, apply BC filters and you'll squash the gama. If anything push the gamma higher to compensate, go for hot images on the NSTC or PC monitor.
3) Yes, use guassian blur to stop jitter but only apply it in the vertical direction.
4) Encode direct from the Vegas TL, do not render to DV first.
5) Consider using 24p and authoring your DVD as 24p, that might mean you don't need the blur in the first place and on a progressive monitor there'll be no interlacing, the DVD player will convert to interlace if needed.
6) You might get slightly better results converting the stills to an uncompressed format outside of Vegas and maybe at native res as say PNG. Making Vegas rescale and then having the encoder do another ICT MIGHT cause a small quality hit.
7) Play with small samples, burn to DVD-RW for testing.
8) Remember the res of PC monitors is WAY better than any TV displays, to make a valid comparison compare on the same monitoring device.

Bob.