Text Blurry on Title Screen - any suggestions?

[rbergero]

I am in the process of backing up Star Trek the Next Generation, Season 1 and have created Title Screens for each episode.

Since there are 25 episodes, I created a "template" in Photoshop with an image in the background and a text layer that I can edit for each episode *show number, air date, etc.

My base image is a 480x480 bitmap with the idea that DVD2SVCD would not have to resize it and my image will appear on the screen exactly as I layed it out. I did this because some images like the ones from amazon get the tops and bottoms cut off during the conversion to bitmap process.

The problem I am having is that the text appears blurry when viewing the Title Screen on the SVCD but when I look at the TitlePicture.bmp, it appears very crisp.

Does anyone have suggestions on a way that I can create "text based" type Title Screens that would not appear so blurry? Maybe a larger bitmap size like 960x960?

[JFerguson]

I've encountered this problem as well. See:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23004

I think it has something to do with the way the bitmap is converted to MPEG. Still trying to figure this one out...

[gerti67]

Hi there,

there are two kinds of "MPEG Stills" allowed in the SVCD specs. These are Low-Res MPEG Stills in 480x480 pixel format for NTSC and 480x576 pixels for PAL. The Hi-Res MPEG Still format is 704x480 for NTSC and 704x576 for PAL.

By default, DVD2SVCD produces Low-Res MPEG-Stills for the title and change CD picture items. If you want to use Hi-Res MPEG Stills then you have to edit the corresponding Avisynth scripts for these pictures. But DVD2SVCD only let's you edit the Avisynth script for the main movie (yet), so you have to use a "workaround".

Here it goes:

Just tick the "Edit as part of Video encoding" option in "Frameserver" tab and wait for the conversion process to stop at this step and you will see the Avisynth script window for the main movie. At this stage the Avisynth scripts for the title and the change CD picture are already created automatically by DVD2SVCD. So just search your conversion directory for the "ChangeCDPicture.bmp.avs" and the "TitlePicture.bmp.avs". Open them with Notepad and make them read like this:

*** For NTSC Hi-Res ***

LoadPlugin("D:\PROGRA~1\DVD2SVCD\AVISYN~2.DLL")
Blackness(2)
AssumeFPS(25)
ConvertToYUY2
BicubicResize(640,480)
AvisynthBMP_Loader("G:\Conversion","TitlePicture.bmp")
BicubicResize(704,480)
ResampleAudio(44100)

*** For PAL Hi-Res ***

LoadPlugin("D:\PROGRA~1\DVD2SVCD\AVISYN~2.DLL")
Blackness(2)
AssumeFPS(25)
ConvertToYUY2
BicubicResize(768,576)
AvisynthBMP_Loader("G:\Conversion","TitlePicture.bmp")
BicubicResize(704,576)
ResampleAudio(44100)

Now just save the changes for both of them and hit "OK" in the Avisynth script window from DVD2SVCD - then the conversion process continues right till the end.

You should now have CD images with Hi-Res title and change cd MPEG Stills. For your convenience you can copy the created "changecdpicture.bmp.mpg" and the "titlepicture.bmp.mpg" to a safe directory and use them as the input for the "Titel picture" and "CangeCD pic." pulldowns in "CD Image" tab (yes, it accepts MPGs not only BMPs ;)).

But be aware, if you do it like this, then you should use a source pictue with 640x480 pixels dimension for NTSC and 768x576 for PAL. So you will get a title and change cd picture with absolutely correct aspect ratio for your TV sets. No distortions of circles and squares and because of the nearly doubled resolution the text readabilty should be much better.

Hope that helps,
Gerti

P.S. Another way of doing this would be to use VCDEasy's built in support for the MJPEG Tools. Just go to Tools/MPEG Stills and you can also create your MPEG Stills right before the whole conversion process so that you don't have to wait till the video encoding starts.

[rbergero]

Thanks again Gerti for the reply. I'll give it a try (NTSC for me).