I was looking at a project created in Encore that a friend gave me. He used thumbnails for the chapters and boy did it ever look great - crisp and sharp. When I tried the same thing with DVD arch, the thumbnails really looked soft and unprofessional - also like it was a compressed jpeg or something. So I went into Photoshop and found some picture that I liked and created thumbnails that way - same thing happened, soft and looking worse for wear. What the heck am I doing wrong to get this difference?

don't know. it could be the monitor you're looking at, it could be the resolution of the still or video footage vs. what your friend had, it might be the way you're rendering the footage, where you're rendering (Vegas vs. DVDA).
Far too many variables and too little information to give any logical intelligent help.
As the robot in the movie "short circuit" said 'More Input' :-)

Don

Are you looking at the finished product on DVD, or are you viewing in Preview?

I suggest trying to burn the DVD and seeing how it looks, if you haven't. In preview DVDA will sometimes show thumbnails to be blurrier than they will be when the project is burned.

Also, remember that menus are ALWAYS rendered. If you give an MPEG2 original for the menu, the MPEG2 will be decompressed, resized, and recompressed. It might also help to make the menu Progressive instead of Interlaced.

Well, I will try to give more info.
The project from Encore used the MPEG that were rendered from Premiere (that is what my friend told me about his project). The thumbnail from encore take a thumbnail the same way Arch does.
Now, I don't have the ENCORE project to check this, but I do have a finished DVD. When I pop the DVD into my computer using Window Media Player, the Encore thumbnails are crisp and look great.
Ok that is for Encore, now I performed the exact same steps for Vegas.

For Vegas, I took 1/2 of his MPEG (that were already rendered in premiere) and 1/2 MPEG rendered out with Vegas. I then brought them all into ARCH and proceeded to look at the thumbnails. They are blurry in Preview AND when I view them on the TV after a burn.
(also, I looked at the preview of the ARCH DVD using my computer - just like the Encore DVD - and lo and behold, the ARCH thumbnails looks blurry in Window Media Player - unlike the ENcore DVD).

So this is leading me to believe that they are being compressed in Arch for some reason.

Now the last thing I did was created JPEG and BMP thumbnails in photoshop and used them for my menu in ARCH. Same thing, blurry and soft.

This is ridiculous. This is the 3rd project I have created that looks terrible. I want to get screen grabs, but I don't have permission from the people to use them. Text is the only way I can go that looks good. Using thumbnails, jpgs, bmp, targa and tif all look blurry when I render them out and play them on the DVD player or on the computer. How the heck does Encore do it - this is crazy...