Thanks for taking a look.

The offending avi is in the project near marker 5. It's only 1 frame, so you have to zoom in. If you enable track 1, you'll see the quality degradation I'm talking about.

This does seem quite disturbing. There is a significant difference between the PNG and the rendered frame. That's definitely more than I would have expected. It would be good to find out what is happening here.

Although I think the comparison with Quicktime (Default) is the equivalent of going to Uncompressed AVI right:? So maybe not a valid comparison with DV format.

Its taking the 5-1 dv hit. Render to uncompressed it is fine. Magnified just a bit in Photoshop and it starts falling a part, so when the compression hits it , well you see.

Even despite the 5:1 compression... the "artifacts" that get introduced are incredible. Especially the vertical line on the right side. It practically gets destroyed. It's just not what I would have expected. I wonder if there is something about the composition of the PNG that is making this worse.

Yeah.. but rendering it at BEST does absolute nothing (or very little anyway) to improve the final render (in this case). I did comparison renders at BEST and GOOD and Interlaced and Progressive and they all have (for me) an unexpected degradation of the result.

It's nice to keep things in Uncompressed... but if you need to go out to Tape (DV) then you have to render to DV...

What would you recommend in this case then?

EDIT..... and I have done a LOT of projects (some for broadcast)) containing stills / graphics and never noticed such a huge quality difference as is evident in this project.

I agree Liam, this thing is taking a major hit, much more than I would expect. Must be the graphic is not clean enough to stay decent in dv form. At least thats what I think is happening

On a computer monitor the DV version looks bad, but have you looked on NTSC? Monitoring from the timeline and clicking a "bad-looking DV version" on and off you can't tell the difference.

In fact, if you look closely at the red vertical line on the right while the PNG is displayed, you can see that it's broken into three distinct lines, as is the DV version.

The real problem is that NTSC has trouble with that color combination. Looking at it on a computer monitor, the blue and red are distinct because of the brightness of the red, but that gets lost when viewed on an actual NTSC monitor, even without making it broadcast legal.

Rendering as Sony YUV will make the render look as good as the original, but again, when it gets to a TV it'll look the same as the DV version.

By the way, that graphic will look much better with "Reduce Interlace Flicker" turned on.

Fred

Edit: I went into Photoshop and made that red line on the right into white, and it looks great as DV on the computer and on an NTSC monitor. The blue and red just get muddied on NTSC and I doubt there's much you can do about it. Yellow would probably work well with that graphic.

I had a few minutes this afternoon, so I downloaded your test file and rendered it up. It behaves exactly as I expected given the design of the graphic. DV simply does not handle diagonal solid colors very well. The thin, red, diagonal line border sitting inside a solid blue shaded background is an absolute "worst case" situation for DV compression. This is due to DV's 4:1:1 color sampling.

You can perhaps minimize the effect by getting into Photoshop and adding a little bit of noise to the red border elements and maybe some noise to the blue as well. This will "dither" it and make it somewhat easier for the DV codec to compress without artifacts.

If you end up using the suggestion to make the red border yellow, just make sure it isn't very saturated, bright yellow introduces a whole other set of problems in television.

John

(Winrock, the graphic is actually too clean.)

.............(Winrock, the graphic is actually too clean.)
John can you elaborate, what do you mean too clean.
Thanks
Edit, after reading your post again I think I get what you mean.

Thanks everyone for having a look.

I'm gleaning that compressed DV has "always" looked this bad, I just never noticed. (Obviously, it depends on your project as to how bad it looks).

If I want to archive my rendered project, I should save as uncompressed, or perhaps QuickTime default? But I should NOT save as compressed DV. That's what I'm hearing. Yes?

DV is generally very good with "natural images" and, as you discovered, sometimes a problem with graphics. If you have the disc space, then archiving an uncompressed version is a very good idea. I often archive projects as .AVI using the HuffYUV codec. The Huffy codec is essentially lossless, but files end up being about 2/3 the size of uncompressed due to YUV encoding. If you go this route, make sure you get the HuffYUV v2.1.1 codec and not the newer (and buggy) v2.2.0.

Here is a link to v2.1.1:

HuffYUV codec

There were a couple of recent threads where the subject of uncompressed 4:4:4, DV 4:1:1 and DVD 4:2:0 colorspace conversion was discussed. This directly applies to your situation. Both of the threads got a bit ugly because of a certain ex-forum member, but the information contained in the threads is still valid.

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=391938

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=390252

John