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Fuzzy Text on DVD export (AE comps in AP as well)
Hi CC Forums! First posting so very excited to join. Been using these forums for years looking for answers on my own and now I’ve finally decided to be more active and “ask” instead of “seek.”
Anywhoo, I recently wrapped a safety video for a landscaping company and made some dvds that they could disperse to their employees. When I exported my sequence out of Premiere, I made an Apple Pro Res for archiving, and an H.264. We shot the footage on Panasonic HGDVX cams and I edited completely on Premiere with a couple AE comped text banners (very basic slide ins). I also made quite a few text power-point-ish slides within Premiere’s text editor.
Basically, my digital files came out great, but when I made DVDs, the text (especially the text created inside Premiere) was fuzzy over color blocks (I layered text over a block of color because the client wanted this). You could definitely see banding of the text and pixels. I even found a shot of mulch where the detail in the strands of plant are creating fuzziness (hard to explain, shot just looks grainy).
I have no idea what’s the deal? Since this is a text heavy project (safety video with many safety powerpoints), this was annoying. I have a feeling it was the way I was exporting and compressing the files.
I do know that even though this footage is 1920 x 1080, does it need to be compressed to 720 x 480?
Just as a general note, is it better to make ALL text in After Effects?
Here is my workflow…
Workflow: Premiere sequence -> Media Encoder (preset DVD 120 min, MPEG2 -DVD, 29.97, Progressive, VBR, 2 pass, max 7mbps bitrate) -> = .m2v files for DVD Studio Pro
Then: DVD Studio Pro -> DVD (720 x 480)
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4 Replies
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Hmm….thanks for confirming…Is there any way around this? Maybe exporting a higher bitrate? How do major studios or other pros do this?
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It’ll probably look great on an SD TV… That no one has anymore. When you’re doing DVDs you’re dealing with a format that is pretty restricted (you just can’t bump up the bitrate because the max is specced in the format) and what you’re seeing with your color boxes and text is probably being hit with chroma subsampling issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling
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Text that might look great as HD is going to look bad as SD. Far, far less resolution unfortunately. Could you maybe post a screen grab of an offending frame? I bet the text is just too small to look good as SD, not to mention the heavy compression for DVD as Dave mentioned.
While you said the max data rate for the DVD was 7, with 2-hours of footage, the AVG is going to be just 4.5 which is not helping the quality at all.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Seconding everything above. DVD is good for standard def video, and not much else, really. Unless I was using M-disc, I wouldn’t even use DVD for data storage.
You may need to look at alternative delivery, perhaps via YouTube or something similar. Anyone with a computer can access it, and at least see it in 720P minimum, which would be a terrific improvement over DVD standard def.
Otherwise, if you must deliver physical media, Blu-Ray video or data disc with a file they can transfer to their computer is the way to go. Some Blu-Ray players will read MP4 files on data-formatted discs and play them, but not all.
System:
Dell Precision T7600 (x2)
Win 7 64-bit
32GB RAM
Adobe CC 2015.02 (as of 6/2016)
256GB SSD system drive
4 internal media drives RAID 5
Typically cutting short form from HD MP4 and P2 MXF.
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