Several rendering/quality questions

albullman wrote on 10/26/2007, 9:43 AM
I've created a slideshow set to music that includes event pan/crop, crossfades, track motion, and animated text. I need to figure out what might be causing some quality problems on the final rendered video.

There's a lot of pixelation, especially during movement and fade in/out. But there's also a blurry look to all of the pictures, all the time (even in the "best" preview and when they're not moving), even though they're very high-resolution stills.

What should my project settings be? Sometimes my movies are played on a computer, sometimes burned to a DVD.

What's the best file type? WMA? MOV? Does it matter?

What rendering settings should I use? It seems like I have these problems no matter what template I use. Any settings for the individual photos that I should be aware of?

I don't remember always having this happen; could I be having a problem with codecs or something?

Thanks for your help with my many questions!!

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 10/26/2007, 11:29 AM
For best picture quality in projects, you must resize the pictures to the exact resolution of the project before putting them in the timeline. So if you are going for NTSC DVD, that would be 720x480. If it's widescreen NTSC DVD that would be 873x480 with aspect ratio of 1.0000 (and each picture will have to be individually set as such).
Chienworks wrote on 10/26/2007, 2:54 PM
720x480 would be too wide to fit the frame. The correct size should be either 655x480 or 720x528.
Eugenia wrote on 10/26/2007, 3:39 PM
That's correct, because of the aspect ratio, although you can always set the aspect ratio to 1.000 for each media individually if you want better quality.
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 10/26/2007, 10:17 PM
I have an old Toshiba digital photocamera 2.1 megapixels that I use for still pictures. The size of the pictures is 219Kb on average. When I make a slideshow with these pictures in Vegas and play it on my tv, with rotation and zooms etc, it looks just fine.

So your symptoms are very serious. There really should be perfect quality in your case. You should render to either standard avi, or standard mp2 using Vegas' standard MainConcept codec (NTSC dv or PAL dv).

My next remark could be a really stupid one, but then again, you never know: you aren't using the thumbnails of your pictures, are you, instead of the real files? To make sure, in the Vegas explorer window, rightclick on a picture and study its properties.
albullman wrote on 10/27/2007, 2:02 AM
I've been using the "match output aspect" setting in the event pan/crop window. So I really need to use Photoshop instead to crop them ahead of time?

I tweaked some settings, making sure that the aspect ratios, etc. are consistent everywhere; some things still aren't as clear as they are in the original photos (to respond to the question about whether I'm using thumbnails--no, but thanks for checking)...I'm about to render so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Thanks!
albullman wrote on 10/27/2007, 2:05 AM
Is it possible for codecs to get corrupted/broken? And could that cause these problems? It so happens that my computer's DVD player doesn't work properly anymore, either. There's a weird jitter when I play DVDs (as if someone changed the playback speed slightly).

Thanks again! I'll post again if I still have issues.
Chienworks wrote on 10/27/2007, 5:24 AM
Match output aspect is fine. You don't need to pre-crop or resize your pictures first.

Probably one of the biggest things that affects output quality is the bitrate you use. Higher bitrates result in much better quality. DVD quality is about 6000 to 8000Kbps. Webvideo quality is about 250 to 500Kbps.