import from DVD quality surprisingly poor

VEGAS Pro

import from DVD quality surprisingly poor

Posted by Larry Cole on December 5, 2007 at 4:21 pm

I am importing a video from a DVD into Vegas. This is not a retail DVD but rather one that contains a performance of our children’s musical and was the tail end of a four camera video mix. Before when we used a consumer grade DVD recorder for these performances, the picture when viewed on a monitor was not that great so I was not surprised when the import to Vegas was also poor. I was always forced to go back to the raw tapes from each camera and remix the performance to get my quality back when creating the final DVD.

However, we have since upgraded to a professional grade recorder and the picture when played back on a monitor looks great. My hope was to pull the performance into Vegas, fix a couple of the video mixing goofs using the raw tapes from the cameras and rerender to a new DVD. Unfortunately, the stream pulled into vegas still looks poor (very similar to the previous attempts) with muted colors and greyed out whites.

I know that pulling a compressed stream off a DVD would not yield a file that looks as good as one pulled off our raw tapes, but I would think it would be least as good as the images I saw on the monitor. Since my import from my higher quality DVD looks as poor as the lower quality DVD, I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Larry Cole

Larry Cole replied 18 years, 5 months ago 3 Members · 8 Replies
8 Replies

Douglas Spotted eagle
December 5, 2007 at 4:26 pm

Looking poor in your Preview window, or looking poor on render? Remember that Vegas will recompress the footage when you output it, but all in all, not a lot should be lost. However, the Preview window in Vegas 8 suffers from some very odd/weirdness depending on the size at which it is stretched, and whether you’ve got scaling enabled. Frequently I see where I’ve missized a window by just a touch, and it’s enough to put it into the next scaling algorithm, and it looks horrible.
Try resizing the window, turn off scaling. Set to Best/Full to get a perfect idea of what you’ve got, if you’re seeing the problem prior to render.

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor
Larry Cole
December 5, 2007 at 4:33 pm

I’m looking in the preview window and comparing the import from the DVD with the import from my raw tapes. My raw tape import looks crisp and clean while the DVD import looks muddied.

Would you expect this difference in quality to correct itself upon rendering?

Thanks for the quick response and by the way, I really enjoy your articles.
Douglas Spotted eagle
December 5, 2007 at 4:40 pm

Thanks for the kind words.
It may improve on render, but bear in mind the bitrate at which you encoded the new file is significantly smaller than the raw files, and if you rendered to avi prior to the render to mpeg and then are planning on re-rendering MPEG, you have so little information to play with there, I’d expect soft, mushy video.

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor
Larry Cole
December 5, 2007 at 4:51 pm

The interesting thing here is that the video played from the actual DVD looks great when played on my monitor. When my previous poor quality DVD imported a poor quality file, I was not surprised. When this one did, I was surprised. If I could just keep the level of quality I see when playing the actual DVD on my monitor I would be happy.

I did not consider the subtleties of making sure the imported video matches up with the settings in the preview window and how one source’s video can look good while another will look poor. I’m hopping that your suggestions in your first response will make the muddy video look clean again.

I’ll try your suggestions and make a test rendering to see if I really have a problem.

Again, thanks for the suggestions.

Larry Cole
Adam Rose esq.
December 5, 2007 at 6:58 pm

what happens if you import the video the old way (copy the .vob files to your drive, then rename them as .mov and drop on timeline)?

give it a bash
Larry Cole
December 5, 2007 at 7:09 pm

I copied the .vob files on the dvd to my harddrive and then dropped them directly on the time line.

Would it make any difference if I renamed them?

Thanks,

Larry
Adam Rose esq.
December 5, 2007 at 8:18 pm

if it works, it works

😉

think it might have been necessary in the older versions of vegas……..IIRC
Larry Cole
December 6, 2007 at 2:15 am

Played around a little with the settings tonight and found that if I changed the pixel format in the project properties window to 32 bit floating point (from 8 bit) that my color and quality was restored. I don’t really understand what this does but it seemed to do the trick.

Thanks for the help.

Larry

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