Encore menu scaling from BR to DVD

[Benjamin Maas]

I'm having some very frustrating problems here. Most of them started with encore CS6. It started with the missing libraries of templates. Adobe helped me get those back, but I still seem to be missing a lot of stuff.

Today, I have a project that started as a Blu Ray. I made a menu that used a static frame grab from the show as a background with simple text and a logo over it. My Blu Ray turned out great.

I then did a Save-As and went to author a DVD. I kept the menu as is, but replaced the video with a new mpeg file that I rendered off the same original edit. From everything I've read (and from the experiences of previous projects), I expected the menu to scale down for the DVD and would look fine.

However, in this case, not so much- the picture seems to be generally ok, but the text that is over top of it and the logo look absolutely horrible. They are pixelated around the edges and nothing looks clean and sharp. I've been going around in circles all afternoon trying to find a solution. I'd redo the menu (it's a pretty simple one), but I don't seem to have any blank menu templates which means that any new menu requires me to strip out all the crap I don't need so I can create this simple new menu. Even then, the HD ones are still 1920x1080 like this one and all the SD ones are not wide screen.

This should be simple- what am I missing?

Thanks!

--Ben

[Benjamin Maas]

I've been doing lots of experimenting. It isn't just the downsampled menus that are the problem. It's all DVD menus. The text is just blury/fuzzy looking. Pixelated, etc...

Doesn't seem to matter what the resolution the menu starts at. Doesn't seem to matter what font. The photo is reasonably decent looking, but my goodness does the text look horrible. WTF. I need to get some DVDs out and I can't let them go like this.

And no, it isn't just watching it on a big TV. I've looked at these DVDs on 2 computers, 2 DVD players and a Blu Ray player.

Ready to kill Adobe again.. Any suggestions on how to get some usable menus here?

--Ben

[Alan Craven]

I have always found that I need to downscale Blu-ray menus for DVD in Photoshop rather than Encore.

What I do is start a new menu with the correct dimensions for DVD in Photoshop. Like you have done, I import a new background image. I then duplicate all the items I want from the saved BR menu into the DVD menu, and do any necessary scaling there.

[Benjamin Maas]

The thing is I'm having these problems even when I reconstruct the menu at 720x480 from the ground up. The photo background is fine. Not perfect, but fine. Text looks horrible regardless of the font or whether I start at 1080 or 480. In some respects, the 480 start resolution looks a bit better, but it still isn't acceptable.

Will resizing everything in photoshop really make it better? How is the best way to deal with buttons where I used a couple colors turning text into buttons. (again, this one was a really simple menu- It was pretty simple to redo)

--Ben