Video Quality low in menu

1 sam wrote on 5/2/2008, 8:06 PM

Hi,

I have a problem with importing a video for the menu for DVD architect 4.5. I render it out of vegas and it seems to look fine, but after burning onto DVD and watching on the TV screen, the video in the menu page is very low quality. The videos i am using for the menu look great in vegas but once imported into dvd architect the quality is shocking.

i tried so many different render settings and wasted about 15 DVD discs burning and testing. If i use a JPEG for the menu page it looks fine but a video doesnt seem to look good.

Does architect allow video files as menus?

thanks

Sam

Comments

MPM wrote on 5/4/2008, 12:39 PM

A few things that you can do, Sam...

TO start with, you can see how the finished DVDA DVD looks played back on your PC, using either a burned disc or by rendering your project to hdd before burning. You can also check to see how things look by (pre) viewing using an external monitor (TV) – this is pretty std if you do a lot of video work, so IMHO well worth the investment. [Many (most?) graphics cards already have an svid out jack, so you just need a cable & whatever time it takes to set it up.] Remember that your player & your graphics card software may have the option to change how video displays, and if so, these options are often turned on by default.

If your original video for the menu background looks good on TV (as it comes out of Vegas), but poor after DVDA, import your background video into DVDA as an avi file in a lossless or near lossless format – that way it gets encoded (compressed) to mpg2 once and only once. If that helps but doesn’t completely do it for you, it is possible to get DVDA to pass your menu video thru untouched: add whatever graphics &/or text in Vegas, then (usually as a last step in a finished project saved with a new name) delete the menu page title object DVDA tacks on to every menu page. Do this and you should see your menu video with a green checkmark in the Optimization window, meaning that it will not be re-rendered.

If your original video doesn’t look good on TV, check the colors, range, and intensity, making sure they all match your TV specs (PAL/NTSC). You can try interlaced or progressive video (I like progressive but many disagree), and if you use interlaced make sure that you’re using the correct field orders. For an interlaced TV display, in general avoid thin, sharp lines and edges – a little blur or the flicker option in Vegas can help. If the problem isn’t your video but the composited text &/or graphics, try a bit of feathering & using shadows.