Very difficult to get rid of this with thin horizontals. Don't know how many spreadsheet graphics there are, but if it's practical you could try using a Paint program to thicken the lines, that is, draw thicker lines over the top of the thin ones.

At least try a few lines and see if it makes a difference.

I've just finished the same sort of project, it was caused by fine horizontal 1 pixel lines from Powerpoint.

Right click on the image, select "switches/reduce interlace flicker". Worked fine for me.

Cheers

Yup, the Guys are correct . . I've had this and sometimes the "client" needs to step back . .maybe not a suggestion I would follow . . but sometimes graphics are not prepared for the rigours for ALL occasions - yeah? That's why armies of graphics/multimedia individuals are employed to "home" in on "A" specific piece of work for "A" specific project . . Peter is already making the suggestion to get "busy" with a graphics package . . so you can see where this one is going . . . okay, enough of the "I wish the World was perfect" . . back to the job in hand:

1 - Have you seen this site? http://www.100fps.com/ . . . lots of ideas and "reasons" for something similar to what you are explaning . . yeah?

2 - Off the top of my head .. have tried a wee and I do mean a very small bit of motion blur or blur? . . Its got me outta of trouble on a number of occasions. I also notice that when I used one of the famous "scripts" to produce a "RenderIMageSequence", the actual stills were rock solid. Very firm and steady. When I did my own, Save Snapshot from timeline I had a flickering of a person holding a wine glass . .and that wine glass was shaking . . okay it was "funny" but not what I wanted . . The script must have made a still - which was actually "still" . . If I get a chance I rout it out and see what the Media Format ended up as - yeah?

. . . anyways . . there will be a solution to this . . Which side of the dteline are you? You going to bed or are you getting up? I'm in London 6:30am GMT . . so .. what's it by you? I'll get on the case anyway . . just firing up Command and Control Centre now - HAH!

. . .you'l get there . .

Grazie

There yer Go! kevgl is correct " . . . switches/reduce interlace flicker". Give this a try - yeah? G

I tried the reduce interlace flicker switch in Vegas .....still seems to vibrate up and down.... the thinness of the line does seem to be a major factor ....
It is totally cool that I got 5 suggestions after 10 min of being posted ...
Vegas forum folks are the best out there.... thanks a bunch.....
I am beginning to think this thin horizontal line thing is beyond the display capability of the DV & DVD Spec

I am in St. Louis it is about 1 am .... I got a couple of days to see if i can find a solution ... sombody said paint thicken the lines I'll try that...
Then the ...RenderIMageSequence ......is thast a setting in vegas ...like render to avi ... itried rendering to Avi and still had the jitter thing ...

Have you tried to simply output the PPT's to tape? If you have the budget I would higly recomend a plug-in called EchoFire. It is *not* a Vegas plug BUT it comes with a stand alone utility called ScreenWriter. It will send your desktop out via firewire. So you could play back your PPT's and record onto mini-DV and then just bring em back into Vegas for editing and output to DVD.

Hiyah . .how's the coffee/cafiene intake? - HAH!

"Then the ...RenderIMageSequence ......is thast a setting in vegas ...like render to avi ... itried rendering to Avi and still had the jitter thing ..." - The RIS is not within Vegas, per se. It is one of Scripts created by a chap to be used as part of the Vegas Scripting Tools. It is a free script out there . .can't remeber which site it is on . . But you will need to have Microsoft .NET framework to make any of the scripts to work - okay? Others can give you the link to this one ..

Okay, this Script produced, as far as I can tell, the follow rock solid format:

Attributes: 786x576x24

Format: JPEG Compression

Frame Rate: [ greyedout . .it's a still hah! ]

Field Order: None [progrseeive scan]

Pixel aspect ration: 1.0000 [Square]

Alpha channel: None

If you can see your way in to get this type of Still "still" then you might be there. I also think that the "thinness" of the lines AND the decoder . .the device you are showing it on can also get you what you are saying. The next time you are stitting in front of your TV, have a reall good critical eye at something similar produced by the networks -yeah? See what skinny lines do . . IF they use skinny lines at all! The other BIG thing is that why have spreadsheet lines anyway? Yes, I knoew this isn't in your remit . .but if you are gonna start tinkering aroiund making your clients lines thicker anyway, you may want to check out with your client if you could TOTALLY remocve these lines - period! then your troubles are history . . Sometimes "Less IS More" . ..

Anyways, if you aint seen or been aquainted with scripts, you are SERIUOSLY missing a major card in the deck of cards, we call Sony-Vegas!

Here's the link to SPOT's site where you will find Scripts, Tutes, Veggies and all sorts of yummie things to aquaint yourself with:

http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/help/kb/kb_tutorials.asp

Get the Job DOne FIrst! Then go play . .yeah?

Hope this helps . ..

Grazie

Nice idea Filmy! I like this too! - Grazie

I'd try to take a step back and try re-importing the PPT graphics. May be to late for this, given your deadline. However, once you convert to TIF, or any other bitmap format, the number of pixels is fixed, and if you have a horizontal line only one pixel wide, there is not much you can do.

However, if you can export as WMF (Windows Metafile) or EPS or some other vector format, you may be able to import this into Photoshop or some other image editor and then upconvert to a much higher resolution. If you import this into Vegas and let it scale the resulting graphic back down, you may get better results.

I'll admit that I haen't done this myself, however. I'm just "dry labbing" it here.

DELETED

. . got it one Zipps . . G

Have you thought of just pointing your video camera at your computer monitor and recording it?

Of course, that is if you have a camera like GL2/XL1-s (maybe others?) that have the option for clearscan'/flicker free recording off a computer monitor?

i dunno? Just a thought out-of-the-box..

You've hit the limitations of the television system. Horizontal lines are a real problem, even the edges of large lines don't look that good, particularly if they're about 1 deg off horizontal. When television stations took themself seriously if you turned up for an interview wearing clothing with certain patterns they'd send you down to wardrobe.
Venetian blinds are another problem causer, even vertical striped clothes will cause moire patterns.

Your only chance is as others have suggested, fatten the lines up.
You may well also find the text looks pretty horrid as well if it's small fonts. You do need to demonstrate this to the customer, don't let them feel it's your fault. One of the biggest problems with this kind of thing is letting the customer get the wrong idea. They go off in a huff to someone else and he tells them the same thing. By the time they get to the third place or someone who looks real high rent they realise you were right. Only problem is they don't come back to you and eat humble pie.

You could try duplicating your track/tracks and use Track Motion to move the new tracks one pixel up or down and then set the level to 50 % on the tracks that are above their copies. Resolution will take a hit, but hopefully the flicker won't be so bad. And don't forget Reduce Interlace Flicker.

You could try to use a progressive scan instead of an interlace. This has helped me in the past.

TomG

The other thing I just thought of is how are you capturing the PP slides?

Does PP have a way of exporting the slides as graphics files? Tryi setting the resolution lower if you can or if you're capturing them off the screen using something like SnagIt then do the same thing, set the video card to a lower res and then capture.

You see a lot of Windows apps let you specify line widths as 'hairline' which means they're rendered to the screen one pixel wide. So if you capture the image at HiRes whne it's scaled down to video res that one pixel width suffers badly.

We've found the same thing recording from the video out of a video card, running the PCs screen at lower res gives a better result.

Here's a Microsoft take on the issue:

How to Videotape a PowerPoint Presentation

The Microsoft Powerpoint team produced a tutorial on how to do what you're trying to do. See it here:

Recording your PowerPoint Presentation to VHS


Some other ideas here:

PowerPoint to Flash Converter Products

and here:

Google groups search

Older posts on the Powerpoint to video question:

PowerPoint 1

PowerPoint 2

I purchased a software package that will fit your needs!!! And it is inexpensive- $49.99! I use it for many of my corporate clients.

http://www.dvdxcopy.com/point.asp

Great link to DVD X Copy. That lead me to links for another product called Camtasia. Here is a tutorial for how to do PPT to video using that product:

Camtasia for PPT to Video

Getting the PP to video is the EASY part for this guy. His BIG problem is the poor look of the results and that's a limitation of DV.
That's what he needs help with.