[Tevya Washburn]

Just so you know, using a lossless or relatively lossless format to render these IS the way to go here so you’re not recompressing MPEG, not sure why the guy on the other forum told you to do it that way.

As for the rest, I’m not quite sure what to tell you, but I do have a couple possibilities: 1) it might have to do with interlacing. Double check and make sure you have enable progressive render of DVD menus checked in the General tab of the Prefrences dialoge. Then also go to the General tab of the properties menu with your background media selected, and make sure reduce interlace flicker is set to “on”. –actually on second thought, maybe you want this off because your video is already progressive (anyone else want to weigh in here?).

2) If both those things are in place, it could have something to do with the way DVDA resizes video. I assume you’re rendering at native 720×480 with 4:3 (.9091) Aspect Ratio. If this is the case, try rendering it with square pixels and a resolution of 655×480 so and see if that makes any difference (still use progressive and uncompressed).

If you’ve been doing all this already, and my new suggestion doesn’t change anything, then I’d say, just use the shadow option in DVDA to create the text there (set the X & Y offsets to 0 and keep the blur down tight). Hope something here works for you.

–the Fiddler

[Tevya Washburn]

No, your concerns are not unfounded. Recompression does do a number on quality. The reason it’s recompressing your menu video and not the audio, is because it has to add the control buttons to the video in order to make them a part of the DVD. The audio doesn’t get changed, so there’s no need for recompression. The solution is simple, just render your menu video out as an DV .AVI or a completely lossless compression like Huffyuv. Then put it in DVDA, and let it compress it to MPEG2 (only compress once). This way you’re not compressing it twice. You can still do progressive if you like, which I’ve found helps, but now I can’t remember if you should select the “reduce interlace flicker” option when you use progressive.

–the Fiddler

[Tevya Washburn]

Are you actually rendering it out? Or are you just preview rendering? Sometimes a simple setting like “simulate device aspect” can make text and other things look jaggy and poor, but it’s not actually that way, just appears as such. Once you render out to DVD, or better yet, to square pixel for web or something, it should look fine.

–the Fiddler