Text From Screen Capture Unreadable After Render

MarcusAur wrote on 8/4/2014, 11:18 PM

Hello! I have a Youtube Let's Play channel where I record gameplay off of my computer and post onto Youtube with commentary.

I record using a program called dxtory with the x264vfw codec.

A particular game I am currently recording has a small font in the UI. When I view the raw capture video it's 100% perfect and readable - just like on the screen. However, after I run the video though Sony Movie Studio Platinum 13, regardless of the fact that I'm rendering at 1080p and with bit rates up to 12mb/s, the font comes through unreadable.

For an example, view the video at the link below in 1080p and look around at the text on the screen. It's not even that it's blurry, more like Movie Studio chops off the top or bottom edge of the text.

My video render settings are: AAC
Video: 29.970 fps, 1920x1080 Progressive, YUV, 12 Mbps
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.000
Properties are upper field first, 1.0 square, 29.970 (NTSC), no stereoscopic, render setting best, deinterlace is interpolate.

Although I usually keep Mbps around 9, I tested with 12 and it didn't improve.

Again, the raw captured video does not have this problem, only once it comes out of Movie Studio. I have seen other Youtubers with this exact same game and the text is even readable at 720p. It almost looks like a smooshed aspect ratio but I know for a fact both my input and output are 1920x1080.

Any help would be appreciated! Thank you!

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 8/5/2014, 3:57 AM

Without complete media, project, and render properties, there is no way anyone could tell.
But why oh why are you rendering progressive source as interlaced?
YouTube is compressed again, so it tells nothing about what you rendered in Vegas.
Original clips only, please!

MarcusAur wrote on 8/6/2014, 12:38 AM

Ok, sorry for the multiple posts, but I did some more research. I rendered the file using huffyuv codec to avi which is completely lossless, and the text was still all garbled. Finally, I did the auto preview, without even rendering, and the text was garbled in that, too.

So the initial AVI generated by my recorder looks perfectly fine, and then just dropping and dragging in into Movie Studio 13 garbles the text up, even before I render/compress/anything.

I just tried rendering the exact same recorded file in Handbrake. The resulting .mp4 was much superior to the Movie Studio one, and the text was perfect. The problem, and the reason I use Movie Studio in the first place, is that I cannot edit my audio in handbrake (cutting out beeps and so on) but I can easily in Movie Studio.

So something Movie Studio is doing right when you drop the file in is garbling the text. I believe I have played with every setting but perhaps there is something I've missed. That seems really odd to me that it would have that specific effect, but I can't see a solution.

VEGASNeal1 wrote on 8/6/2014, 9:52 AM

Some things to try ...

If you're using "Upload to YouTube" on the Make Movie dialog, you might instead try rendering to disk and uploading the movie to YouTube manually, outside of Movie Studio.

When rendering to disk use the "Advanced" button that appears on the Make Movie dialog. Select a suitable format and template, such as format "MainConcept AVC/AAC" and template "Internet HD 1080p".
Now click "customize template".
On the "Video" tab of that template there's a checkbox "Allow source to adjust frame rate", ensure this is un-checked.
On the "Project" tab change "Video rendering quality" to "Best".
Click OK to close the "custom settings" dialog.
Using this revised template, render your video and see if the results are better.

MarcusAur wrote on 8/6/2014, 7:15 PM

Thanks gret! The solution actually came from something that musicvid10 said and I'm going to detail it out here for anyone in the future who may be searching with a similar problem.

When you set up a project in Movie Studio, you have three main 1080 options. You have 1080p at about 24 fps, and you have 1080i at 50 and 60fps. My videos were shot in 29.97 fps progressive, so Movie Studio automatically chose 1080i 60fps, Since there was no default for 1080p 29.97fps. However, what I did was I just chose the 1080p 24 fps option, and then once it was chosen, I changed the fps to 29.97, hit apply, and viola, the setting were the same as my video. The thing was, I had to customize it. Even hitting the "use same settings as the source video" button didn't work. No idea why. But this was the main thing that saved the day: I set deinterlace to NONE. Once I made those small changes, suddenly everything was fixed. I saw it immediately on the preview and it carried over to the render.

So in essence, my problem was that Movie Studio was too dumb to correctly determine my video parameters or to have a template that took them into consideration, and I was too dumb to customize, thinking that since I'm not a real video editor and didn't know what any of those terms meant I had to do what the templates told me, which was blend fields or interpolate.

I wonder why 1080p at 29.97 which is standard US fps isn't a standard option. Maybe because Sony is Japanese? Either way, I am so happy that ordeal is over, and I learned something, so all good.