HELP! blurry (lousy compression) menus in DVD-lab

[sharktacos]

I authored a DVD using DVD-lab, and after compiling noticed to my horror that the menus look awful, the same kind of artifacts that you would see if you took a jpeg and compressed it to death - artifacts, jaggy edges, etc.

So I am guessing it must be something going wrong in how DVD-lab converts the whole thing into an mpeg but don't know how/where to fix it in DVD-lab.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated. If this has already been answered elsewhere please let me know where. I did a search and couldn't find anything

thanks!

[sharktacos]

Anyone? Anyone?... Buhler?

[dvdnew]

after compiling noticed to my horror that the menus look awful

Are you testing this in your computer or in a player?
Can you post a picture from original menu and actual menu?

Is hard to give advice if the problem is never seen. My menus always look good.

[sharktacos]

Are you testing this in your computer or in a player?

I am testing it on my computer with powerDVD before I burn it.

Can you post a picture from original menu and actual menu?

bellow I have before and after pics. I have cropped them so they would not take up too much bandwidth here (The two pictures also have a different aspect ratio but that is normal)



you can see that in the second picture bellow that after compiling it has lots of artifacts around the edges of the text and the colors are way more saturated then in the original as if it has used a reduced color palette.

[dvdnew]

The only thing I can think of is the Project Properties. There is Project size and NTSC safe colors. Are you changing any of this?

My Project size is 720x480 even if my video is not.

[sharktacos]

my project size is 720 x 480 (full D1)
and I have the "NTSC safe colors" box checked.
I also ran the background image through the NTSC safe filter in photoshop before using it in DVDlab.

It looks to me like a compression problem when it converts the project into an mpeg but I dont know where I can change those settings