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text issues on playback
Running into quality issues when DVD is played on a plasma screen. Namely, the text will look perfectly fine and then quite suddenly soften with a slight blur, and then a siliscond later snap back into sharp focus. It will be do this repeated, sharp, blurry, sharp, blurry. Othertimes, the text will surrounded by blocky pixelization.
I see the above after my project has been authored to DVD and played back onto a plasma screen.
The text here was built in Boris Title 3d, Arial Black. I place the text on integrers so that’s not the issue.
I edit the video and text in a standard DV timeline. When I am finished, I open a new timeline, set dominance to none, set compression to none, and drop the video and text in. I have also tried various variations, such as setting the dominance to lower, setting the compression to Uncompressed-10, etc.
I select the first Quicktime export option without checking self-cotained using the current setting drop down. My understanding is that this means that the the movie will be exported at the field set to none, the compression set to none. In the past I have tried going the compressor route, but that really does a number on my text, pixelating it magnificantly.
In DVD studio Pro I set the field order to bottom and the mode to one-pass. The bit rate is set to 7.4. When I go higher the video chokes.
I have tried using the deinterlace filter on the text only.
Tried compression markers.
What else can I try?
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3 Replies
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First, try to isolate the issue … if you play the exported MOV with QuickTime, do you get the text issues? If not, the issue is probably with the DVD encoding and the fact that it changes constantly instead of consistent bluriness or pixelation makes it sound like it might be from using variable bit rate encoding instead of constant. The fluctuating bit rate of VBR could cause various frames of similar images to look significantly different in quality.
A couple other comments on things you mentioned …
Putting a lower resolution sequence (or source material) inside a higher-resolution sequence does nothing more than require an additional unnecessary render step and increase the resulting file size … it does not increase the resolution. So, putting a DV sequence into an uncompressed sequence or an 8-bit sequence into a 10-bit sequence isn’t helping the quality of the output at all.
About the DVD encoding, if you are using VBR, you might check that your minimum bit rate isn’t set too low, although it would be better to just use CBR. Either way, you might also try two-pass encoding instead of one-pass since its purpose is to provide higher quality by analyzing the content more closely and encoding it more precisely. Note that two-pass does take much longer to encode though.
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In Quicktime the image looks perfect. But that’s on the computer screen.
In DVD Studio Pro 4.0, I have been going on-pass, 7.4. In the past, I tried two-pass.
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[In Quicktime the image looks perfect. But that’s on the computer screen.]
As I mentioned, that means the issue is with the DVD encoding. The fact that you view the QT file on a computer screen is irrelevant unless you’re suggesting that the issue is with the plasma screen instead of the DVD itself, which is easy enough to find out … just play the DVD on a different player and screen. However, I’d be extremely surprised if the issue is the screen or DVD player unless one of them is stretching the images significantly, which seems even more unlikely than usual to cause the kind of issue you described since you said the issue changes constantly, which wouldn’t happen if it were due to aspect ratio stretching.
Again, the issue could be VBR encoding instead of CBR, which is different from one-pass or two-pass.
I’ve offered all I can to help … good luck.
Dave Johnson
Sr. TV/Video Specialist
Raymond James Financial – Marketing
St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S.A.
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