Text Smudging In Rendered File

BobWard wrote on 4/25/2011, 9:44 PM
I have a text credit roll that is playing over a video overlay track that includes both ground and sky images.

I originally set-up the credit roll text in Arial, red, bold font. After rendering, the text was extremely smudging looking (basically unreadable) while it was playing aginst the darker ground images, but became very crisp once it transitioned into the blue sky image. The smudgy-ness only occurs in the rendered file - the unrendered VMS10 file plays perfectly. Any idea as to what causes this?

I re-rendered the project with yellow text and it looked much better, although the yellow text started looking a little smudgy against the sky texture, but was crisp against the darker ground.

Is there a preferred font style and color to prevent these types of issues?

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 4/25/2011, 10:36 PM
You just didn't render properly. You didn't use enough resolution or bitrate, or both. Export like this if your source is HD: http://eugenia.queru.com/2007/11/09/exporting-with-vegas-for-vimeo-hd/
MSmart wrote on 4/25/2011, 10:54 PM
Or.....

you could let us know the project properties and render settings. What are you using to view it? What's the final destination? DVD? youtube?
Chienworks wrote on 4/26/2011, 6:34 AM
Both DV and MPEG-2 have low color resolution and don't handle strong color contrasts well. Red is particularly awful in this respect, and red on blue is going to break up badly. Yellow is slightly better because it adds green and DV gives green twice the resolution of red, though in MPEG-2 there shouldn't be much difference.

Pale colors always work better. Larger text always works better. Simpler, sans-serif, bold fonts always work better.
BobWard wrote on 4/26/2011, 8:49 AM
This was a 25 minute movie.

Project properties: 1600 x 1080, 29.97 fps

Rendered to DVD (720 x 480) as:

mpeg-2 / AC-3

Variable bit rate - 2 Pass
Max: 9,800,000 bps
Avg: 6,000.000 bps
Min: 192,000 bps

DVD burn speed: 4x
BobWard wrote on 4/26/2011, 9:00 AM
Chienworks,

This is kind of what I suspected. All the lighter colors that I experimented with became less smudgy. I will play around with some different fonts as well.

One other thing I noticed is that when playing the DVD on TV, the color saturation of the entire movie is much deeper (over saturated) than what I see on the VMS10 timeline, prior to rendering. This must have to do with how computer screens display color vs TVs.

Would it help to do all my editing on a TV monitor rather than a computer monitor?
AlanADale wrote on 4/27/2011, 2:26 AM
Good question Bob as regards the TV monitor and an answer to this would also be welcome from me. As a photographer I regularly calibrate my monitor to ensure accurate colour/luminance when editing in Photoshop. Does VMS actually read from the icc profile that is produced by monitor calibration as there doesn't appear to be an option for this in Preferences?