Hey Paul,

I haven't tried that, but I will right now!

Scott

Hmmm. Still no help. Any other insights out there?

I'm sure you're viewing it on an external monitor but sometimes with stills I have to render and then view it on the external monitor where jaggies showing up on the computer screen no longer exist. Also, if previewing a veg to an external monitor at full frame size I sometimes get weird crawling that doesn't show up once rendered.

Paul,

This is actually a rare project where I'm rendering out to a high bit-rate WMV. My client is going to project the file from his laptop onto a screen.

Perhaps it would render OK for NTSC. But on my laptop, I see some shimmering in the marble stringcourse of a building interior.

I can post a file if you're curious to see how it looks....

Scott

I've been experimenting myself with a photo movie I'm making where I'm rotating around a subject standing in front of parallel parking stripes. I tried something I've never tried before, the linear blur plugin at about .002. Seems to help and you can adjust the angle of the blur. Maybe using this alone, or with a cookie cutter (as a child? haven't done parent child for a while) would enable you to smooth it out enough, or at least just the part you need to.

I think I know the problem you're referring to. One other suggestion might be playing with a Color Corrector Gain and Gamma (maybe lowering the gamma a little. Anyways, good luck!

If it's output to 60i I use the smallest amount of vertical gaussian blur you can do and that fixes it. I have a gaussian blur preset and I just insert it on the photo animation tracks rather than on each individual picture. It gets rid of 100% of the flicker. If I output to 24p, I don't need to do this.

There is more on this over at the VASST site.

I am completing 14 still photo montages set to music. Here are the things I do.

1. Reduce interlace flicker. I actually don't think this does much. Before I finish this project, I'm going to try testing this by doing several problem stills (including, of course the pan/crop motion), rendering both with and without reduce interlace flicker. I will then put this on a DVD-RW and view it on a big monitor. You MUST view the results on a TV monitor to know what you're really going to get. Having not yet done this test, I can't say with confidence that Reduce Interlace Flicker is useless, but I don't think I've ever seen a big difference.

2. Render using the BEST setting. This is what the BEST setting is really for. It is a waste of time when doing motion video, but can make a big difference on stills.

3. Reduce the resolution of your image!! This will usually fix even the most stubborn problem because the reason the problem exists is the fundmental physics problem of making a 720x480 (NTSC) interlaced image from somthing that is a much higher resolution (e.g., 3000 x 2000). When Vegas zooms or pans this image and then reduces the resolution down to 720x480 a decision has to be made as to which pixels get thrown out or blended in order to create each pixel in the 720x480 matrix. Depending on the angle of the pan, the zoom speed, the detail in the picture and many other factors, this can create flicker, staircasing, and many other artifacts. However, if the image is already 720x480, then Vegas doesn't have to blend or eliminate pixels; it merely moves the 720x480 matrix up/down/left/right, and you don't get any artifacts.

If you are not zooming in your image, then use your photo editor (e.g., PhotoShop) to reduce the resolution down to something pretty close to 720x480 (or whatever project resolution you use). If you are zooming in so you have only half the original horizontal and vertical space, then you'll need twice the resolution in each direction, or 1440 x 960. If you starting with a 4-6 megapixel image (like 3000 x 2000), then you'll almost certainly get these problems.

4. Try the various blur fixes mentioned earlier in this thread, but only after you've done the other things mentioned above, and only if you really need them.

As I said before, there are a few other ideas over at the VASST site.

[Edit] Actually, upon actual testing, I found that Reduce Interlace Flicker does help quite a bit. See my thread here:

Results of still photo flicker tests

I'm sure this isn't the case, but I assume you're viewing in a higher quality than draft (I.E. Preview, good, or best).

Sure it's stating the obvious, but sometimes that's just the thing that get's overlooked.

Have a good one, and best of luck resolving the problem.

Dave

Thanks for the suggestions, John. I will definitely try the resolution technique. In my case, yes, I was zooming in on an image, but I think the image was probably still larger than it needed to be.

The problem is fairly easy to understand but rather tricky to fix.
Video is sampled at a certain rate, 13.5MHz I think for DV but the exact frequency doesn't matter. If a signal say 1Hz above the sample rate goes into the system then a beat is produced equal to the difference, in this case 1Hz! I have some HiRes stills that demonstrate this very nicely, when rendered out to DV a large part of the frame 'blinks' at a quite low frequency, very wierd result from a very still still!
Now the simple answer is to filter the signal, ideally you want a filter that is flat to just below the sampling rate and rolls off to minus infinity at the sampling rate. Such a filter though cannot be built. If you roll off too much you're loosing detail, too gradual and you can get lots of aliasing etc as we're seeing. This isn't just a Vegas problem, I'm seeing a lot of material going to air down here thats been shot in HD and downscaled to SD with lots of artifacts due to this problem.

Add gaussian blur at .001 in the vertical direction only usually gets rid of the problem however it does seem to knock the resolution down more than I liked. To get around this I set the project to 1080 HD, added the GB as mentioned and then encoded to SD PAL mpeg-2 widescreen. Results are awesome as they should be, the very best of the stills which were taken with an expensive camera, look as good as ANY commercial DVD.
I've got some 14 megapixel tiff stills I want to go back to one day and see how good I can get them onto DVD now that I've got a machine that'll handle them, last time I tried Vegas chocked.
Certainly reducing the res to start with will solve the problem but from what I've seen I get better results keeping all the res even when I'm not doing any cropping.
Bob.