Optimal Photo Montage Settings in Vegas

[John Rofrano]

Hi James, it sounds like you’ve been giving this a lot of good thought.

When I’m delivering a photo montage on DVD I like to use 24p for two reasons: (1) images are progressive so you should keep them progressive and (2) 24fps renders faster than 30fps because there are 6 less frames to produce.

I set my project to NTSC DV 24p Widescreen (720×480, 23.976 fps), set my Ruler to SMPTE Film Sync IVTC (23.936 fps, Video). Then I render my video to MainConcept MPEG2 with the DVD Architect 24p NTSC Widescreen video stream template and my audio as Dolby Digital AC3. This keeps the entire workflow progressive.

You are correct to process your images to luminance values between 16-235 and make sure your colors are broadcast safe as well. I would crop the pictures to either 873×480 or double that depending on if you want to zoom in. This will create the proper widescreen images (I assume you want to use DVD Widescreen but if you don’t then use 655×480 and non widescreen project and render template settings as well).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[James Dubendorf]

John,

Thank you for your reply. I didn’t want to respond until I had time to perform some test burns. I’ve experimented with converting files from JPEG to PNG, altering their color, resolution, and other features in GIMP before uploading to Vegas, applying various color effects in Vegas, and optimizing my project properties (Movie Studio Platinum 10.0 describes anything at 24p as custom, but it fits the standard render template you describe), render settings, etc. I’ve been testing dvd burns on my computer, as well as on a large screen television through a dvd player and my computer’s dvd player via HDMI cable.

Unfortunately, I am still having issues with image quality. Perhaps some background will help. I initially assembled these images as a Power Point presentation. On the computer, and on a large screen television via HDMI cable, they looked fabulous. My goal is to recreate and improve upon this presentation in Vegas. I realize that the dvd format has constraints on its resolution, but I’ve been truly surprised at how poor the results are so far. Certainly the quality of non-HD broadcast television seems superior, as well as commercial dvds. Either I am just being unrealistic about what to expect from Vegas and/or dvds, or something is going wrong in the process. Do you have any suggestions how I could go about diagnosing the situation?

On a related note, is it wise to stay away from images with certain features if planning to render to dvd? It seems it is hard to make straight lines (horizontal, vertical, and even diagonal) look nice. Even relatively simple text that I have rendered in GIMP looks quite pixelated. Images with bright, distinct colors and a minimum of fine detail, however, look better.

If it really isn’t possible to recreate this Power Point presentation on a dvd-appropriate format, I will have to rethink my goals here. It doesn’t seem as though I’m asking much of Vegas relative to its potential capabilities, and so I hope there is something I’m missing. Thanks again for your thoughts.

Best,
James

[Dave Haynie]

Well, a couple of things.

Vegas does a fine job of resizing images, and I use this extensively for my photo montages. I also render at 1080/24p usually, but since I shoot in RAW, I can render using 5-8Mpixel PSD or PNG files, no need for dealing with the additional artifacts of JPEG.

And for you DVD, do be sure to render at 24p in the proper DVD 24p format. If you don’t render to the proper format, DVD Architect will re-render, lowering quality substantially.

One main reason to use larger images is motion. SD television is actually pretty evil in quality, but the fact that it’s moving suits our visual systems better, so a little motion tends to make for a far better montage, even though it’s a bit of extra work. Here’s an example:

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Ensuring you’re progressive is fairly important, since interlacing, with or without motion, is going to look bad if you have any detail in your photos.

For text rendering… well, it IS going to be pixelated. Your best best is to render with anti-aliasing, which will blur the edges using transparency, and thus reduce some of the pixelization. But also render for SD TV. While it’s quite possible to put 80 characters across a 640×480 old-timey VGA screen, that’s assuming 8×8 character cells. For proper video, use a large enough font, and of course the anti-aliasing (if you’re not happy with either of Vegas’s text generators, you should be able to render text with anti-aliasing and alpha channel, to PNG or PSD for example, in The GIMP… I know you can do so in Photoshop).

-Dave

[James Dubendorf]

Dave,

Thanks for this response. I am slowly learning that at the end of the day, there is only so much you can ask a DVD to do. I am tailoring my images and text to take this into account- I now know that I must stay away from too much fine detail- I will make text bigger and simpler, try the anti-aliasing you mentioned, and really focus in on the parts of my images I want to emphasize, either through aggressive cropping before Vegas, or zooming in Vegas. As you say, the zoom is a great tool in these cases, and seems to work pretty well.

Unfortunately, I am having problems rendering in 24p from Vegas to DVDA,and can’t figure out where I am going wrong. Movie Studio HD Platinum HD 10.0 does not appear to have any templates in 24p- so I manually set to 23.976 frame rate, progressive scan, and 1.2121 pixel aspect ratio. When I render to MPEG2, Vegas tells me this fits the DVDA widescreen 24p video stream template. When I bring the rendered MPEG into DVDA, however, it continues to tell me it does not support 24p and must recompress. I just can’t find a fix and have tried everything.

I suspect some of my quality issues have to do with recompression. Any hint you could offer on diagnosing my problem would be appreciated. Thanks again. Also, beautiful images on the montage!

James

[Dave Haynie]

Could be that Movie Studio HD doesn’t properly support DVD at 24p.

For proper DVD support, you have to render 23.976 fps with pulldown… Vegas Pro calls this “23.976 + 2/3 pulldown”. Pure 23.976p or 24p works on Blu-ray, but will re-render in DVD Architect for DVD.

-Dave

[James Dubendorf]

Dave,

I am starting to wonder whether the problem is my version of DVDA Studio 5.0. I’ve seen nothing suggesting that it DOESN’T handle 24p encoding, and the existence of templates in Vegas suggest it does, but only DVDA Pro 5.2 actually advertises 24p DVD encoding (https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/techspecs).

Though Movie Studio HD 10.0 doesn’t offer 24p templates in project settings, it does offer 24p MPEG rendering templates (which then must be recompressed every time I feed them to DVDA).

If I do actually need a software upgrade, I would have appreciated some indication of that before losing hours and hours to trouble shooting/banging head against wall. I may have to go Pro to get this done.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

James

[Matt Crowley]

I have Movie Studio HD Platinum 10.0, and it has Mainconcept MPEG2 presets for NTSC DVD Widescreen 24p (with appropriate pulldown etc).

Being in a PAL country I’ve never tried 24p DVD. It could also be that DVDA doesn’t correctly interpret the 24p files – unlikely though since it’s a companion product to Movie Studio…

[James Dubendorf]

Matt,

Thanks for your input. I have that window as well, and Vegas tells me my project fits that template when I render to MPEG2. I should have been clearer that there are no 24p templates in the project properties window (as opposed to the window you show, which I believe is part of the render)- there is a widescreen template, but it is 29.970 fps.

I share your assumption that companion products should work together (in fact, this seems to be the explicit purpose of the render templates- to work with DVDA!), but have not yet found a solution.

James

[John Rofrano]

[James Dubendorf] ” I should have been clearer that there are no 24p templates in the project properties”

Yea, I forgot that for some silly reason Sony doesn’t provide a 24p project template in Movie Studio. You can just make one yourself by selecting 23.976fps as your frame rate and “Non (progressive scan)” for your field order and then same that as your 24p template.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[James Dubendorf]

John,

Thanks for the clarification. Even though I’ve figured out the custom setting that fits Vegas’ 24p widescreen render template, DVDA continues to tell it does not support 24p and must recompress my file- this appears to happen whether I set the render to include pulldown or not.

Since the very purpose of the template is to ensure compatibility with DVDA, I just can’t figure out where the problem is…any suggestions?

James