Well... No wonder!

I hadn't yet resized my images -- I was forcing Vegas to try to pan&scan with 3008x2000dpi images at 300dpi resolution.

Slapping my forehead 3 times.
There have been earlier threads on the topic specifically of the best size&resolution to use for source photos, but I just now did some experimenting re the tradeoff between resolution and non-flickeringness. I'm using NTSC, 720x480 ("DVD Quality") as my final output.

For a photo that is NOT going to move and is shown full-frame (not zoomed in), I see distinct but "tolerable" visible difference between 720x480x72dpi as compared to 1440x960x300dpi. ("Tolerable" has to be defined by your own taste and your intended audience, of course.)

For a photo that is not going to move but is shown zoomed way in, there's a quite noticeable difference between those two sets of settings. The lesser setting is not really acceptable, if there's a lot of fine detail in the zoomed area.

For a photo that IS going to move (pan&scan&zoom), the jiggly artificacts are VERY noticeable when using the larger-dimension source photo, and almost completely absent with the lower-settings source photo.

This implies the use of different source-dimensions for individual photos in a slideshow, depending on whether a particular photo is static full-frame or static zoomed or is going to be pan/scan/zoomed.

I don't feel like reworking the slideshow I finished yesterday, but the jaggies are terrible on the zooming/panning shots, so (sigh), I guess I'd better go do it...

Ernie

Large photos will give you the increased resolution, but as you said, any movement will show some flickering, especially in straight lines/high contrast areas.

All my montages are sized at 72dpi. This will look "softer", but eliminates the "jaggies". Also, you can selectively blur the areas that are causing those effects. Like mildly blurring someone's plaid shirt. You don't want it to be noticeably blurry, just enough to take the hard edge off the stripes.

"All my montages are sized at 72dpi."

As has been pointed out many times in the past (and recently, too) DPI has absolutely nothing to do with video. It is ALL about the image dimension measured in pixels.

If you have an image that is 3000x2400 at 72dpi and another that is 3000x2400 at 300dpi, Vegas will treat them EXACTLY the same, since they are both 3000x2400. Once again, DPI means nothing unless you are scanning a photo of a certain physical dimension and want a specific image size in pixels. A 4" x 6" photo scanned at 72dpi will end up being 288 pixels by 432 pixels. The same photo scanned at 300 dpi will be 1200 pixels by 1800 pixels.

John

You can point it out all you want, and it does makes sense. But from my standpoint, when using zooms and pans, a photo will look better in Vegas if it's dpi was set at 72 in Photoshop before importing into the timeline. From my experience, Vegas doesn't treat each photo the same, in terms of how the final output looks.

The main points are:

1. The final output will have the same resolution as your project. For PAL this is 576 vertical pixels and 720 horizontal pixels. Implication: Regardless of the input DPI, the output resolution of any photo will be 576 x 720 pixels.

2. If you want to zoom and / or pan photos, the quality of the output depends on the input resolution (DPI) of the photos. Example: if you want to zoom in 50 percent, the input resolution must be at least two times the output resolution if you do not want an unnecessary bad quality.

Hope this helps.

Joran