Fade-in / Fade-out artifacts

vitalforce wrote on 11/8/2007, 2:41 PM
Can anyone advise on how I might minimize the noticeable artifacts in Vegas 8 on fade-ins and fade-outs to/from black in a 32-bit project? I have an SDV feature length project with various film-like settings including a small amount of gaussian blur plugin, and when rendering to MPEG-2, although the 32-bit render seems to generate better color, I see on playing back the burned DVD, these artifacts which are 'ghosts' of the images in the frame which fade out as distracting moving grey outlines before going to black.

Any thoughts on how I can eliminate or minimize this render result?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 11/8/2007, 3:17 PM
Two suggestions: make the fades faster, or make them slower. If you make them fast enough the artifacts will happen so quickly that they may not be noticeable. If you make them slower, then encoder won't have to handle as much change from frame to frame and it might cause the artifacts to be minimal enough to not be noticed.

Slower can probably backfire badly though if it doesn't diminish the artifacts as then they'll be on the screen for what will then seem like an eternity. Faster is probably the better choice.
vitalforce wrote on 11/8/2007, 3:38 PM
Thanx for the idea. Hard to shorten a fade too much as an editorial choice, as this is a romantic drama meant to play like a studio film, but I'll try both ideas.
vitalforce wrote on 11/8/2007, 6:19 PM
Interesting addendum here. Playback of the DVD on the PC side of my Mac Pro/Bootcamp/XP-SP2, using the Nero DVD player,yields no visible artifacts. They only appear during playback on the stock DVD player in OSX on the Apple side.
Chienworks wrote on 11/8/2007, 7:27 PM
Interesting. Sounds like some poor coding going on there in that player.

I had another idea to try too if the problem does come up again. Try fading piecemeal. For example, fade to b&w first. Artifacts shouldn't be noticeable since all the form detail is still there in the image and only color detail is going away. Then fade to black. Artifacts should be much lesser as the color detail is already gone and there's much less data for the encoder to cope with.

I'm sure there's other ways to make art creatively cover up shortcomings of technology.
vitalforce wrote on 11/9/2007, 10:00 AM
Sounds excellent, I will try that on a new render and report results.
Former user wrote on 11/9/2007, 10:20 AM
Another thing to try is not to fade in or out, but instead, on a new track put a BLACK generated image. Dissolve that in and out and you will get the same result as a fade in or out, but maybe lose the artifacts.

Dave T2