I should've thought of this before...

B.Verlik wrote on 5/11/2006, 10:56 PM
I'm only posting this, because I don't remember reading this before. But it's not anything that special as far as a fantastic idea goes. In fact, I'm sure it has been posted somewhere, but I'm not going to go looking now.
Frameserving from the Vegas timeline directly into DVD-A, when going to make a DVD. You can make an interesting menu loop and the lettering looks pretty good too.
This would have to be better than using an .avi, right? Well, it sure looks better to me, especially the lettering.


(probably be some wise acre, who'll drag up a post from a week ago, saying the same thing.)

Comments

Grazie wrote on 5/11/2006, 11:35 PM
Eh? Sounds enormous! Can you just give me something more so I can go and experiment? I've used FS for all sorts of stuff. But this sounds fascinating for making a better DVD.

TIA

Grazie
farss wrote on 5/12/2006, 1:20 AM
You can achieve the same thing several ways.
Add the text in DVDA.
Render as uncompressed.
Basically your problem is this.
If you're in NTSC land the AVI will be 4:1:1 and DV 25 compressed, DVDA needs at add (composite) elements to that in the menu, they'll look fine as they're 4:4:4 going to 4:2:0 but the background is going from 4:1:1 to 4:2:0 and will suffer and on top of that is the DV compression!

However render the background out as uncompressed and you'll get the same result, or you can render the background out as 8Mbit/sec mpeg-2, it'll almost certainly get re-encoded unless you're really careful not to add new elements (I think that works) however DVDA seems to handle that very well.

Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 5/12/2006, 8:44 AM
This would have to be better than using an .avi, right?

Not necessarily. "An AVI" can be anything. One normally assumes DV AVI, but you can use other encoders, including those that retain full colorspace. For short things like menu loops, it is probably easier to render to AVI using Sony YUV or similar codec. This is a lot easier than running the frameserver, especially if you have several menus, because to import more than one menu would require having multiple instances of Vegas running, each with its own frameserver. The "lossless" AVI, using one of the lossless codecs (HuffYUV would be another) would be a far better way to go for short things like menus.

The frameserver really shines when you need to pass big, long projects to another program, and don't want to lose any quality, and don't want to consume 60 GBytes/hour for uncompressed video.
B.Verlik wrote on 5/12/2006, 11:46 AM
**This would have to be better than using an .avi, right?**
That was a weird way to put it, since the output of the frameserver says .avi.
I was, of course, talking about, better than a newly rendered .avi from the timeline.
I'm not sure about DVD-A 2 or 3, but DVD-A 1 doesn't do menu compression that well, although the lettering in DVD-A looks pretty good, there's not enough control on what you can do with it.
When using .avi's with lettering, they look awful. But I have more control on the way the lettering looks and works in Vegas.
Frameserving allows me to make scrolling or Pan & Cropped Text that looks fairly good, considering the options in Vegas, and it comes out pretty good in DVD-A now. And the picture/video appears to be a little clearer too.
I just got all excited because I thought of something that seemed to work, and I didn't read about it anywhere else.
I'll get to the complex, multi-menus's later. But for one portion of the menu to look this way, I think it's pretty easy to just use the frameserver. I don't have that big of a work flow.