5 Replies Latest reply: Dec 23, 2010 1:47 PM by Stan Jones RSS

    HD Blu-ray Project - Built to - SD DVD and TEXT BUTTON HIGHLIGHTS

    MTrubac Community Member

      I am using Encore CS4 on a Mac Pro running 10.6.5. I have authored a Blu-ray project and built my menu inside Photoshop CS4. The menu is 1920x1080 and has multiple text buttons. The buttons each consist of a layer group "(+) Button Name" with one text layer inside. I originally selected the option to "Create Text Subpicture" for each button inside Encore. I later tried creating subpicture layers inside each button set in photoshop by creating "(=1) Button Subpicture" layers inside each "(+) Button Name" group.

       

      I configure my color sets and in the Encore Preview and burned to a Blu-ray disc the button highlights look crisp and clear. I then try to build a DVD format disc output to a DVD. My menu highlights are very jagged and the edges of text seem to be clipped off (I see the normal state color).

       

      I have made sure to turn off antialiasing on all of my text buttons. Am I expecting too much from Encore's downscaling capability? If I resize my 1920x1080 menu to 720x480 and change the PAR to NTSC Widescreen in Photoshop, and then start with a fresh DVD project in Encore everything looks fine. I am hoping to not have to rebuild the chapter menus and button routing every time I author a project to both BD and DVD.

       

      The buttons in my chapter menus work fine. Not sure what the difference is except for a different color set. I have compared the menus in photoshop and all of the settings seem to be the same.

        • 1. Re: HD Blu-ray Project - Built to - SD DVD and TEXT BUTTON HIGHLIGHTS
          Jon Geddes Community Member

          The downscaling quality of Encore menus from HD to SD is absolutely horrible. This is why I always build separate projects for Blu-ray and DVD, despite the program's capability to output DVD and Blu-ray from a single project. You will get much better quality by downscaling your menus in Photoshop.

           

          My company creates motion menu template kits for Encore, and we create separate button highlights for each format (HD, SD, PAL) in Photoshop for our products, simply because of the unacceptable quality of Encore's downscaling.

          • 2. Re: HD Blu-ray Project - Built to - SD DVD and TEXT BUTTON HIGHLIGHTS
            MTrubac Community Member

            That's kind of what I was afraid of. Just wanted to make sure others are having the same experience. It seems like if Adobe has the quality scaling algorithm in Photoshop that they could let Encore borrow it.

             

            Do you know if this is improved in CS5?

            • 3. Re: HD Blu-ray Project - Built to - SD DVD and TEXT BUTTON HIGHLIGHTS
              Stan Jones CommunityMVP

              Do you know if this is improved in CS5?

              CS5 gives you the option of having the Adobe Media Encoder doing the transcoding rather than Encore's transcode engine.  Jon, do you know if this is being used for any of the menu/motion menu renders?  I have assumed not, but have not tested.

               

              When using the AME option, it only applies if you pick "transcode now" rather than letting the transcode occur when doing a "build."  There is an option for rendering motion menus, but I suspect this still  uses Encore's engine.

              • 4. Re: HD Blu-ray Project - Built to - SD DVD and TEXT BUTTON HIGHLIGHTS
                Jon Geddes Community Member

                AME does not touch the PSD files which contain the button highlights. Also, in Encore, you cannot enable maximum render quality for the scaling of the PSD menu.

                 

                In CS4, we attempted to enable Maximum render quality in the default transcode settings of the motion menus, but this resulted in an error during the build process. We now just import a prescaled SD asset for the motion menus, done in After Effects, and don't let Encore do any scaling.

                 

                When creating an SD version of a Blu-ray project, we create separate SD motion menu assets (scaled in AE), we transcode separate SD m2v's for our main videos outside of Encore (using Dan Isaacs hd2sd avisynth script), and use separate SD menu psd's which have been downscaled in Photoshop using the Bicubic Sharper algorithm. Since all the assets are different, we simply create a new project for the SD version of the disc to avoid problems with Encore when attempting to replace so many assets.

                 

                Regarding the transcode of assets in AME instead of Encore, I'm afraid rendering only in AME will not give you the best results. According to an article written by Adobe's Todd Kopriva, found here, for the best algorithm that the Adobe suite has to offer (Lanczos), you must export from Premiere using a CUDA supported card. Simply transcoding in AME will only use CPU processing, which uses the variable-radius bicubic algorithm (inferior to Lanczos). To get the Lanczos algorithm downscaling from the GPU, you must create an SD sequence in Premiere, import the HD source, scale it down, and export using a mercury playback supported card. This is my understanding from what he wrote in the article.