No Background Media and BD-R build Error
 

I recently (last week) moved to Windows7 Professional 64 bit and started installing my software stack on top of it. That finally included the Sony Vegas Move Studio 10 Production package, which I know is 32 bit, and Neat Video Pro plugin 32 bit for Sony Vegas. I then started testing.

One of the things I've been interested in is how hard would it be to take one of my Vegas Movie Studio 9 projects, original footage=HDV, target=DVD, and instead take it to BD-R. I have all the original footage and project files.

I loaded a project into VegasMS10 and used the BluRay preset to render my output video and audio file.
It produced a 1440x1080 25 Mbps m2v video file and a 48KHz 16 bit stereo w64 audio file. So far, so good.

I then loaded up the DVD Architect project files into DVD Architect Studio 5.0 and started playing around.

Problem #1: None of my backgrounds on any of my menu pages will show. Instead I have a perfectly black background. I can try setting it - no change. I can right click on the background, get the drop down menu, and select 'Open Image in Graphics Editor' and boom! I'm looking at my picture in the graphics editor. So it is there, it just does not show.

Problem #2: I render to BD-R. It seems to get almost to the end and I get an error message:

Note: I have these problems even if I create a new DVD Architect 5.0 project from scratch.

The enclosed pictures illustrate the problems.
Any and all advice greatly appreciated.

I've found more time to investigate this and what I have found is...

In DVD Architect Studio 5.0, using BMP files as Background Media does not work properly.
JPEG's and TIFF's work just fine however, so there is an easy work-around.

Thanks Bill. I very rarely work with BMPs directly, due to their ridiculous size. But good to know none the less.

I'd hope it could work with PNGs as easily...

Thanks,

With great frequency my backgrounds are derived from framegrabs. In this case, the framegrab is captured into Photoshop, resized from HDV 1440x1080 to 1920x1080, and saved. Given the source is a video frame, the size is not bad. I like BMP precisely because being uncompressed, it avoids the degradation that unavoidably happens with something like JPEG, especially with an image that while HD, is far from the quality of a DSLR image.

And PNG appears to also work just fine.

The reason this is annoying to me is precisely because DVD Architect Studio 4.5 handled BMP files without issue.
And DVD Architect Studio 5.0 allows you to specify BMP files, it just doesn't display or render them properly.
Something bad slipped in going to 5.0...

I also get the second render error when preparing a DVD image directory.
Happens right at the end after it has dumped all? almost all? the data into the target directory, then deletes the target directory data.

As it should. Unlike BMP, PNG is compressed. Unlike JPG, the PNG compression is non-lossy, so there is no image degradation. And unlike both BMP and JPG, PNG has an optional alpha channel, which is great for compositing.

Additionally, the PNG file format is freely available for download as well as fairly simple to implement, so just about any bitmap and video software can both read (import) and write (export) PNG files.

That includes the wonderful (and free) IrfanView which can quickly resize bitmaps (including from 1440x1080 to 1920x1080 or to anything else). Doing it in IrfanView is much simpler than using Photoshop and the result is very good.

Re: No Background Media and BD-R build Error
 

I spent today revisiting this issue.

1) Wiped the OS+programs HDD
2) Reinstalled Windows 7 x64 from scratch
3) Did Windows Update to get everything Windows current.
4) Reinstalled Sony Vegas Movie Studio 10 Production Package.
5) Brought back an old HDV --> DVD project from the archives.
6) Vegas went through the process of rendering for BluRay.
7) DVD Architect - brought in the rendered video+audio footage + BMP pictures.

Same as before.

As I see it, going to BluRay with VegasMS10 does not work.
Oh well, the upgrade was cheap - at least I got more rtacks out of it.
Hopefully they will have it fixed in version 11. Or maybe an update.