Solved .JPG Picture of Document Unreadable

On my video project timeline I included a .jpg picture of a document. Within Movie Studio, the document is perfectly clear. Once the project is rendered to DVD, watching the video on the television makes the document completely unreadable. The letters look totally scrambled and blurred. Is it possible to have a readable document on a DVD? Thank you.

DVD only uses a Standard Definition video frame size of 720x480 pixels - this is very low resolution.

Turning a Text Document into a .jpg is a very bad idea, because of the way .jpg compression works - it creates a huge amount of "fuzz" and "pixelation" around the fine details of the characters.

It would be better if you saved the Text Document to .png format - this should produce a much finer resolution.
Also make sure to save the text document at a high quality resolution - use a high pixel count frame size.

Thank you. I will have to start experimenting.

Experiment #1. I photographed the document in RAW format, did some light editing and saved it as .png, put it on the timeline and rendered to DVD. Viewing on the television was still unreadable.

I'll move on to experiment #2.

Experiment #2. I shot 20 seconds of the document using the video camera, put it on the timeline and rendered to DVD. There was an improvement over the still shots but not acceptable to read on the TV screen.

Hi Rob

I have been extremely busy during the holiday season and I have not had time to work on other people's work.
I just did some experiments in regards to rendering text into a DVD format.

First comment:
This is a very good reason to create HD Blu-ray discs instead of SD DVDs - Blu-ray uses HD resolutions, so text looks 200% better on a Blu-ray.

For a scanned text document to look the best on a DVD, it needs to be super sharp to start with.
If it is a scan of an old document from Area 51 that was typed on a typewriter, it is going to be extremely blurry to start with and will just look terrible by time it gets rendered into MPEG2 format for DVD.

There is only one technique you can try, to get text looking much better on a DVD.
This is the experiment I did.
Open a text document that was saved to PDF format.
Copy all the text from 1 page of the document.
Open Vegas and drag Titles & Text from media generators onto the timeline.
Delete Sample Text and then copy .pdf text into window.
Right-click and select all text
Then set Font Size to 9 or lower and change text colour to Black (0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)
Add a new video track under the text track
Drag Solid Colour White underneath Text track
Now render an MPEG2 DVD Widescreen sample
When you play back it should look much sharper

The type of Font used has a big influence on Text sharpness.
Simple text works best - "posh" text ends up looking blurry after rendering.

Obviously there is more to this that doing a simple copy and paste of text.
You will want to use Event Pan/Crop and/or Track Motion to to re-size Text window and format to look more like a sheet of paper.
Hope this helps a little...

Just to add to Derek's ingenious solution (a very useful tip for me to add to my list), it is almost always better to use a Sans-Serif font in a video, especially if it's SD.

Richard

Derek,

I wholeheartedly agree with your Blu-Ray vs. DVD comparison. My computer has a Blu-Ray burner, and I have a Blu-Ray player connected to my television. The problem is that those I create video projects for want DVD.

The switch from VHS to DVD was a clear advantage. To upgrade to Blu-Ray didn’t have the same mass appeal.

For my current project I had to drop the inclusion of the document just so I could finish up and move on. However, I will keep trying new experiments. Your copy/paste concept is obviously one way around the problem, but then missing is the look of the document.

Derek, thank you for having the heart of a teacher. Your tutorials could not be presented any better. Keep up the excellence.

Rob

Thanks for you kind words.

The switch from VHS to DVD was a clear advantage. To upgrade to Blu-Ray didn’t have the same mass appeal.

Agreed :idea:

I think there needs to be a new worldwide public promotion of Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray and ultimately the retirement of DVD.
When DVD was released, most homes were still using CRT (glass tube) TVs with relatively small screen sizes compared to modern TVs in 2018.
When Blu-ray was released, not many homes had modern, large screen size HD TVs yet, so there was not that mass appeal and the price of Blu-ray was kept too high for too long.

If I had the public profile of Oprah or a president, I would have a full on nerd attack and run a worldwide public campaign to end DVD for good.
Anyone who regularly buys DVDs, can afford $100 to buy a Blu-ray player.
Sales of Blu-ray movies are actually very strong worldwide, but because Movie & TV studios keep selling DVD versions at a significantly lower price, it keeps encouraging the use of DVD.

Hi Movie Studio Friends,

Sorry to bump this one back up but I have an update. I had a second project to work on with several document to include (which I just completed). This time I used a scanner set to very high resolution, as much as 200MB-300MB file size in .tiff format per document. Rendering to DVD showed an improvement over my previous project. No, some documents were still not sharp enough, but others were surprisingly easy to read. Just for an experiment, I also rendered the project to Blu-ray. Wow, what a difference. All documents looked as they should. And the other noticeable difference in Blu-ray were the titles. They were sharper than I've seen before and just had a "look at me" appearance. Rather sadly though, those receiving a copy of this project wanted DVD. None owned a Blu-ray player.