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ARGH! red text on DVD
I know – DVD’s thin colorspace sampling causes red text to tear at the edges like holy hell…
It looks stunning in HD, and we want to stay with these red titles. We’re broadcast safe in NTSC so that’s not a problem.
Any tricks out there? Is there a way to compress my Mpeg-2 that will yield better results? I’m just thinking in my head there must be plenty of films I have on DVD that have red text for titles, etc…
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11 Replies
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Aaron
Not ideal, I know, but if you just dial back that red a little, it will improve the transfer considerably, and still look vivid enough in most cases – around 80% should do it.
Best I got for you.
Ben
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That’d be my advice too. Red sucks in NTSC so suck some it out.
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Yeah, I’m already at 45% on the vectorscope and about 68% luminosity. So it pretty much is what it is….
thanks though!
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What codec are you coming from and what kind of CG? Boris, Text, PSD?
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PNG from After Effects. Working in 1080 ProResHQ timeline
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Yeah, that should do it. Are you rendering and alpha and have that all set up straight?
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It’s all ship shape. Looks beautiful in HD, looks beautiful with Kona 3 SD downconversion. Looks so bad in DVD colorspace…. it’s depressing!
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[Aaron Neitz] “it’s depressing!”
Yes, you are right. 4:2:0 is sad.
Did you try a bit of blur to reduce the hard edge a bit?
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I send a lot of spots to tv stations that use DV-PAL for their playout systems and a few weeks ago had a similar problem, red text turned to absolute rubbish. The only solution then was to dial back the red color until everything became legible…
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Does it look bad on a real DVD in a DVD player though? Often they will deal with the chroma subsampling better. What colour is the background it’s on. Again, a black line around the red can help if the background is messy.
But in the end, you’re stressing the 4:2:0 of the MPEG2, and it’s reconstruction on playback in a way it was not designed to cope with. Software players can often just duplicate the 2×2 pixel chroma blocks rather than interpolate and make it look worse than it really does. Then, on interlace, there’s the famous MPEG2 decode interlace chroma bug, which again, if it’s on your player, would fail on this kind of image.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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