I made a short but busy video clip with Vegas for my DVDA menu that involves 8 layers of video.

The quality is very poor when rendered, though the quality of the original footage is high.

Any suggestions/explanations? Is this just too much going on at once to render properly?

After quick experiment, I see the issue appears to be that the clip just doesn't look good on the DVDA menu, but when rendered as a .wmv with DVD quality settings and viewed it in Widows media player it looks great.

For use on the Architect menu I render it as Mpeg 2. Is that not the best format for a clip to play on a DVDA menu?

MPEG2 is the correct format for a DVD Architect menu and I don't care how many layers you have, the video should still look as good as it did in Vegas. Are you using the DVD Architect NTSC video stream template when you render? (or PAL)

You might want to try rendering to a DV AVI file and let DVD Architect convert it for you but this should not be necessary. The DVD Architect rendering template should do the trick.

~jr

Menus will ALWAYS be recompressed so it's not good to render to MPEG2 for menus. Instead, render to a less lossy format. DV-AVI is a possibility as John said. If you want even less lossy, you might even go uncompressed.

Edward/John, correct me if I 'm wrong but aren't menus supposed to be renderd in progressive mode (as opposed to interlaced)?

I've never worried about going to progressive mode. It's going to be interlaced when it shows on the TV anyway. I just make sure I don't go to MPEG2 as it's going to get recompressed.

Thank you, I will try uncompressed....and yes I was using the correct DVD architect template.

Incidentally, while the discs that I write usually come out fine, on occasion I get some bad ones...in two incidents customers each got bad discs, five each, all bad.

I use the finest Tai Yuden media. Is it possible that if I was printing discs at the same time on the same PC this caused the burns to be bad?

Thanks!

Jeff,

Try clicking on the "optimize" button (this is available in one of the "Make DVD" screens). Now click "Video 1" and under recompress settings > progressive shoose "NO" . This will probably solve your problem. I was getting jagged text on my motion menus and complained to Sony and they told me they needed to be progressive. Then in the next release they added this option. I remember reading a note in the manual that said it may not be as compatible it you do not do them in progressive but I have not had any problems yet.

Funny thing is my old program Reel DVD has never had a problem with interlaced NTSC motion menus.

Marc

I'll try it, Marc, thank you.