Revisited: Major Flaw in DVD Architect.

FRRjak wrote on 12/24/2005, 9:59 AM
Guys,

Just wanted to revisit this issue.

We're dealing with an authoring tool that is so close to utter awesome-ness it's just amazing that this one problem is keeping me from using it in production.

Moving menu backgrounds ALWAYS look terrible in DVDA 3.0c if there are any menu elements on top and recompression is required. It doesn't matter if the source video is MPEG-2, frameserved, DV-compressed or uncompressed, it always gets pixellated and is rendered at a "preview" quality rather than "production" quality. If you haven't noticed it yet, you're not looking hard enough. It only appears on the final, burned disc. The preview at Best quality doesn't show the artifacts and is not a true representation of what gets burned onto the disc.

Bitrate doesn't have any effect, and I've tried every combination under the sun to get a different result and there's just no getting around the fact that when DVDA has to recompress video to be burned, it is locked into a low quality setting.

This has been proven by myself and a few other users by generating some text on a black field in vegas, render as uncompressed progressive, bring that into DVDA (selecting progressive menu rendering), and place that video element as a menu background. Now render it out again as a DVDA NTSC Video Stream (Main Concept MPEG-2) and place that on the disc as a standalone movie. A check of Optimize DVD will show that the menu will require recompression and the movie requires none.

The standalone movie has perfect, crisp, sharp edges to the text and the menu background looks like amatuer hour. This affects photos as well, and is not as apparent in full-motion video, but it's there. The MainConcept codec DOES NOT have any problem rendering high contrast sharp lines such as in CG text...this is not an encoding issue, it is a bug where DVDA is locked into a preview mode when rendering for disc (previewing the disc at Best results in the quality that would be nice to have on disc, but there is currently no way to specify this quality setting for the burned disc).

Just want Sony to stay aware of this issue...it's keeping me using their competitors products (someone please fix this so I can stop using Avid ALTOGETHER!!!)

Comments

ECB wrote on 12/24/2005, 11:56 AM
Did you 'offically' report the problem to Sony tech support?

Ed B
Padre wrote on 12/25/2005, 8:17 AM
i have to say ive never had this problem, then again i always manage my media sizes to the kb manually.. i never have to recompress anything and if it says i do, i go back and redo what is needed without DVDA taking over..

sometims what pisses me off is the misinforamtion DVDA give, being hat I KNOW the media fits.. but it still wants to recompress.. it does not update its media size calculator. Sometimes ive even had to redo a full menu build coz of this problem..
Marc R wrote on 2/21/2006, 8:42 AM

I notice the same problem in DVDA 2. I use an AVI file as the main menu background that contains JPEGs that I transition through. I use an AVI file because no matter what I use it recompresses the menu. The JPEG images are always pixellated. These exact same images look great in the body of my DVD in the mpeg file of the video. If I pull up the created AVI menu file in Vegas it looks fine there too.

Are you sure there is no getting around this? It's hard to believe that more people aren't complaining about this.
PeterWright wrote on 2/21/2006, 6:23 PM
There is now an option to render menus as progressive - have you used this and still get the problem?
ScottW wrote on 2/21/2006, 7:04 PM
FWIW, I played with this today - the issue seems to be what you feed DVDA. If I fed it uncompressed progressive, the results were terrible, regardless of whether I had the menu render in DVDA at progressive or interlaced. If I fed DVDA interlaced (lower field), the results were much better (again, it didn't seem to matter whether I rendered the menus from DVDA as P or I) - not quite as good as the results using the same clip as the movie, but much improved.

--Scott
Marc R wrote on 2/21/2006, 8:03 PM
Not an option for me. I'm in DVDA ver 2.0b

Per the release notes the option was added to 3.0c

I'll be taking my stills off the menu for now.
Marc R wrote on 2/24/2006, 8:04 AM
Based on your posts concerning Progressive rendering, I went back and tried simply feeding DVDA an mpg that was progressive. I don't think I changed any other parameters, but this actually worked with a nice result. An uncompressed AVI file never worked right for me no matter what the setting. It doesn't make sense that an mpg file that is compressed video - which would be recompressed by DVDA to make the menu (It says it does) - would look better than an uncompressed video that is then compressed for the first time in DVDA.