[David Kelvin]

Thanks for the Photoshop tips, Michael and Jon. Will come in handy in the future.

For now, there seems to be no way to avoid the greying/blurring of the fonts as they’re so small, so I’ve moved on to a different design.

Thanks again for all your assistance.

[David Kelvin]

“Not quite sure what you mean- that particular text is far too small to be usable on DVD anyway.”

I guess this answers my question. It was an aesthetic choice to use that font for a portfolio DVD that will be viewed on 40″+ plasma, and by a very limited audience. In fact, the entire design of the menu was based on, and even inspired by the font. So the small size wasn’t an issue. The issue was maintaining the original shape of the font (exact pixel structure), which seems less and less likely the more I look into it.

I suppose, with my ignorance concerning DVD authoring, my assumption was that DVD menus were treated differently than the movies themselves and thus I could get away with authoring a DVD menu that was almost identical to my Photoshop comp, especially considering the simplistic design.

Compression I can handle. With the simplicity of the layout I can’t imagine there would be any compression artifacts. But the re-sizing back and forth just obliterates the font’s shape, making it almost unreadable.

Thanks for your input anyway. I wonder… can you have a 4:3 menu that launches 16:9 video? That would at least bypass having to re-size the menu. I would have to go with a white text on black background instead to blend with the blank space created by the 4:3 menu when played on a 16:9 monitor, but it could be one workaround.

Anyone have any other ideas?

[David Kelvin]

Thank you for the reply, Noah.

So, if I understand correctly, than what I am trying to do is not possible. The goal is to avoid altering the shape of my text when re-sizing.

I uploaded an example that demonstrates the smearing issue:

https://img7.imageshack.us/img7/2507/smear.png

1st frame is the original 854×480 Photoshop composition.

2nd frame is the original 854×480 re-sized to 720×480.

3rd frame is the re-sized 720×480 re-sized back up to 854×480, to simulate the squeeze/un-squeezing. As you can tell, the original geometrical shape of the text has been smeared to the point of near illegibility.

I can’t test this myself yet as I don’t have access to authoring software, but being in the concept phase I wanted to be aware of any issues like this to see if there were any specific workflows to avoid it, or workarounds to get the desired result.