Vegas to DVD Lab Pro motion menu issues

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This one could go in either the authoring or editing sections I suppose so here goes...

I created a highlights clip (39 secs) in Vegas for use as a title motion menu in DVD Lab Pro.

The clip's source is DV but consists of about 75% overlays created from digital camera stills/text on top of the video.

By default Vegas messes with the colours a bit too much and the rendered result is considerably different from my original overlay .png made in photoshop.

From a google (sorry links not handy) I'm guessing it's a colour space, namely RGB>YUV conversion issue combined with large areas of colour that produces the unwanted outcome from Vegas - I could be wrong of course.

Apart from the colours not being accurate, the other problem is that I'm using the same overlay in DVD Lab Pro as a scene select menu... since I'm using motion thumbnails DVD Lab renders the movie for that menu.

If you hadn't guessed already DVD Lab renders the movie very accurately (maybe due to YUV>YUV?) whereas Vegas doesn't, meaning my two menus are noticeably different colours.

Not acceptable.

How I fixed it was very simple, I just applied the Colour Corrector> Computer RGB to Studio RGB to the overlay track in vegas before rendering.

Now the difference is so negligible I'll run with it but gees... took me a while to figure out a fix!

I'm kinda surprised I hadn't read about this before so I hope this helps someone else out there who may be encountering similar issues.

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BTW forgot to say;

I first considered just rendering an .avi of the DV track only from Vegas, dragging that as a motion menu in DVD Lab Pro, putting my .png ovelay on top and using the render motion tool to merge the two.

DVD Lab wouldn't even import my uncompressed .avi though (didn't give a warning/error either)... so what was I doing wrong there?

The .avi was over the 1GB menu limit but I rendered smaller sections to test and they were rejected too.

It did accept the same footage as .m2v but why would I use that seeing as DVD Lab would want to compress it again in order to merge the video/overlay.

I'm guessing my thinking is wrong somewhere on that one?

[guns1inger]

DVD Lab Pro requires DVD compliant footage, so you cannot use an AVI file. You have to output a DVD compliant video stream.

I create my motion menus in Vegas, and have never had any colours issues, so I would start with trying to resolve the issue there.

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Cheers mate!

I'd made a couple of compliant motion menus previously within Vegas without a hitch & I knew DVD Lab could output an AVI for further encoding - that's probably where I got my wires crossed, in the hunt to avoid re encoding MPEG-2

As for the colours, I've used Vegas for quite a while now too without such issues & like I posted, the colour corrector really fixed it up.

You're right though, even still I need to ensure it doesn't happen again. I'll run a few tests when I'm done with this project to investigate, hopefully I just mixed up a source file (possibly overlay) somewhere along the way.

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Ok, I was mixed up somewhat in the first post but can simplify what is happening now & guns1inger I may need your expertise on this one...

If I render any motion menus in DVD Lab Pro they in fact come out fine & the colour matches with Vegas. Sorry, my mistake there.

So in this project I have 5 menus & 4 are motion menus.

They all use the exact same image/file, the main menu is rendered from Vegas, the scene selects/extras are rendered from within DVD Lab & everything matches nicely.

Here's the trouble - when I use the very same image for the one menu that isn't a motion menu (i.e. just dropping it in as a background in DVD Lab) the colours don't match.

Basically it looks a little less saturated/lighter & is really annoying when you navigate to it because it appears that the DVD does a little flash because the background changes a bit.

I could fix this by just adding some motion & rendering from within DVD, that's easy & probably what I'll do.

Though I'm more interested in why this happens?

I'm sure if you load an image in Vegas & render a small movie to test as a motion menu, then use the same image as a background on another still menu you'll see what I mean.

Obviously when a still is rendered to video there are some changes in the conversion. It's very noticeable & I'd like to avoid it happening again, do you have any advice?

I have one other niggle in this project but it's a totally different type of question so I'll see if I can get this sorted here first.

It's funny, I've made heaps of DVD's with no problems - just going to motion for a big/snazzy project has introduced some quirks.