ops, I was not too clear with my question there!

I was refering to the text (or actually the entire screen really) on the actual video of the screen movement I am using to make the training video. The captures sequence is sharp enough but renering makes it too fuzzy! I've tried several "flavors" of wmv mpeg and mov but they all look too fuzzy.

TIA, Garo

I may have simply misinterpreted!

Are you resizing the original source video during the final render? If so, I would use "Best". I had some desktop screen captures 1024x768 that I was trying to shrink to 640x480 to wmv and it stunk. Best I could do was create an 800x600 wmv with Best and it was just acceptable. I think I lowered the frame rate to 8 or 12fps also.

So if you are distributing to the web or playable video from a cd, and there are no true video/head shots, you can really crank down the fps and crank up the quality settings to still get an acceptable, readable render.

That is the best suggestions I an provide without actually seeing your content. It depends on if most of the clip is graphics or actual video of people.

Dave

The video is the interface of Vegas - the only real movement is the cursor and a window or two opening and closing. Camisa seems to capture in 720x480 and is sharp and clear but the rendered files are too unsharp.

Could you possibly explain what you mean by cranking up the quality and cranking down the fps?

tia, Garo

fps: use a lower frames per second. 29.97NTSC or 25PAL would probably be overkill. Try 10, then adjust up or down to see how tolerable the final video is.

quality: wmv output has quality settings on video and audio. Reduce the audio to a tolerable level, though not too much. Video quality, try 90%. I tried 98% and the wmv file was huge. 90% was much smaller file size while it was readable.

Experiment with a short clip to see how you want it too look.

I am still not getting the crispness I would like. The file size has no importance at this time as long as I can get the sharpness and detail that will make it look as good as a actual screen would. Are other files types better in this respect? I.e .mpeg2 or .mov?

TIA! Garo

Increasingly, computer training providers are finding the same thing: the only way to show a high resolution computer application user interface on a regular video DVD is to show only close-ups of each part you are focusing on.

Because this is more work, and has drawbacks (it is often difficult to see where the closeup fits into the overall UI screen), several companies are giving up on doing regular video DVDs.

Instead, they are using 1024x768 Flash video fed from a data DVD. This looks really good, and you can see something like the Vegas UI perfectly clearly.

Total Training is one of the very largest NLE & VFX training providers. They switched to high resolution Flash for all new productions last fall, the first one being their Dreamweaver 8 training. I've got this training program and love it.

I don't see myself buying any more SD training DVDs for advanced software ever, they're just too fuzzy...

So stick with the Flash for everything. Flash 8 has much better video quality than the old Sorenson codec for the same data rate, very worthwhile. To encode, use On2s VP6 software unless you already have Macromedia Studio 8 (search here for more about these).