Oddball Looking Still on Home DVD Player and PC DVD Player (Vegas 6.0)

[solarblast]

I took two images of the web that I'm interested in, and decided to see how they looked after rendering them and placing them on a DVD. The images are at:

http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/disp.html -- Migration Out of Africa (1st on page)
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cia06/norway_sm_2006.gif -- Norway

I put each still on the timeline and allowed about 10 seconds to view each. I burned them with DVD Arch 3 as Concept MPEG-2.

On both my PC DVD player (with WMP as player) and homePanasonic DVD player, the Norway image looked good. The Migration looked bad on both that player and my Panasonic (not progressive). It has a text box up in the NW area. It looks scattered black, and was quite unreadable. What's going on? Resolution, file size, color depth? Generally the Migration still looks a bit worse than the other. I did not modify either file.

I couldn't play the DVD on my Sony home DVD with progressive scan.

[guns1inger]

I would resize them first in Photoshop to DVD complaint resolutions, then import them.

Another thing to realise - mpeg compression suffers some of the same issues as jpeg image compression. It hates areas of high contrast (e.g. black next to white) and produces artifacts around high contrast edges and text as soon as the bitrate starts to come down.

Something else to consider - interlaced displays aren't conducive to small text.

[Scorpion King]

Also is the problem some programs has when resizing images and adding letterboxing around them. I have also found it far better to edit my images in photoshop before importing them into a video editing program. High Quality stills that are already the proper framesize will display the best.

The first image is 500x440 72dpi Indexed Color with a Transparent background. The second image is 328x715 72dpi Indexed Color on a solid background. The framesize of your video I suppose is 720x480. Both these images are of low quality. The transparent background in photo 1 is probably the cause of your display trouble.........

To fix the first image I would switch the color mode to RGB, then Ctrl + click the layer (select everything except the transparent background), then Select - Inverse (selects the transparent background), Edit - Fill with White, Select - Deselect.

To letterbox it to 720x480 then hit Layer - Duplicate layer, click the bottom layer, Image - Canvas Size, click Relative, click Inches to Pixels, type in Width - 220, Height - 40, then OK. Click Edit - Fill with Black. Click Image - Image size and check your 720x480 framesize, then Layer - Flatten Layers. File - Save As - TIFF. Most any other format will unnecessarly compress the photo file and possibly lower the quality level.

The second photo only needs converted to RGB, resized to 202x440, letterboxed to 720x480, then saved as TIFF.

Good luck.

[solarblast]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll proceed exploring the comments above. I'm beginning to (slowly) understand that some of the disparate images are not so forgiving. One must play by some rules, which are not quite apparent to me yet. It's a beginning. This isn't just about making movies without knowing the technical ramifiications. Back to the drawing board.

Is there some sort of rule book for these notions?

[guns1inger]

Nope. There are some basic fundamentals - resolution, codecs, bitrates etc. that must be observed. There are some good practices that are recommended, but these have a lot of grey in them. And then there is everything else. Sometimes you just gotta try it and see what happens. On the bright side, it is unlikely anyone will die from you trying something on a disc and having it fail.

[jagabo]

This may not be enough overscan compensation:

[solarblast]

Actually, I'm a JASC PSP user, but mostly for cropping and changing formats, with some knowledge of layers and their manipulation. The latter is done infrequently. I happen to have Elements 2, but am curious about what is the latest. Does it have a more robust collection of operations that might fit into the methodology suggested above. I see it has some layer identification facility. In the meantime, I'll refresh my PSP layer knowledge.

[trossin]

Make sure you crank the quality knobs up as high as possible on Vegas. I used the cheap $60 version of it and found that the rendering quality just sucked compared to Movie Factory 4 / Video Studio. I was doing pan and zooms and ran into horrible roping artifacts with Vegas. Not to mention that Vegas took 10x longer to render than Movie Factory/VideoStudio (which was cheaper. Got it for free with my $50 Pioneer DVD drive).

[guns1inger]

You can just leave Vegas settings at Best. They are adaptive, and only come into play with stills and generated media.

[solarblast]

I finally took the human migration file into Corel/JASC PSPro 7 and played with it. In this post I'm attaching the png version. It surprised me that since it has two layers that Vegas 6.0 accepted it. Further it looks like what I wanted. A bigger surprise is that I flattened it and put it into Vegas only to get a black ocean. I'll post it next.

I guess one can only do these one at a time.

human_migrationblue4.png

[solarblast]

Whoops, not black but the bare background. This one I produced from the other by flattening it with PSP 7. Not what I expected.

human_migrationblue4flat.png

[jagabo]

You need to allow for overscan. Most of the legend at the top of your images will not be visible on television. You should also adjust the width and aspect ratio of the images for DVD.

[solarblast]

I thought 655x480 was sort of the approved size for png or other stills. I'm not likely to show this image on digial TV, just the old fahioned tube TV. Is DVD somehow different when displayed on a TV (tube)? Maybe its' the aspect ratio that's causing the oceans to look black in one of the images?

Yes, I noticed the legend is out of the text zone, but can solve that with a zoom (pan/zoom). Unfortunately, there's no easy way to move the legend.