Glittery effect on stills... another question

FJ wrote on 5/16/2005, 8:39 PM
I've read all the posts on here regarding the "glittery" effect that results when panning and zooming on still images. The problem seems to be in the compression (a poor mpeg encoder?), since a show rendered as an avi and run from my hard drive looks fantastic. The exact same show, transferred to DVD using the Sonic program that came with my computer (DVDA, which came with Movie Studio, inexplicably will not burn a DVD), has the "glittery" effect. I've tried all the suggestions posted on this forum, and while the effect can be somewhat reduced, I cannot eliminate it. I get the same effect, although not as pronounced, when I create a program with ProShow. Has anyone been able to completely eliminate this annoying effect while panning and zooming? I'm so frustrated I'm ready to go back to using my slide projectors/dissolve unit.

A related question... GoGiants - you mentioned in one of the posts that it might be best to use another piece of software if you want to create a high resolution slide show. Since my ultimate goal is to create slide shows for use with a digital slide projector rather than for TV, can you suggest a suitable piece of software? Thanks!

Comments

gogiants wrote on 5/17/2005, 8:07 AM
Sorry, but I don't have anything specific to recommend. I just meant you would likely want to use one that created slide shows for display on your PC rather than on a TV. I think most of the slide show-specific programs would do this. Not sure how your "digital slide projector" changes the equation.
gogiants wrote on 5/17/2005, 8:11 AM
I've not followed all the posts on this subject, but has anyone mentioned the possibility that interlacing is causing the problem on your stills? I won't try to explain what interlacing is (that's what Google is for).

I've used VirtualDub to de-interlace short segments of AVI files. The process takes multiple steps and takes time, but it's doable. (Again, Google should turn up both VirtualDub and the de-interlace filter I used... it's been a while since I've done it.)
ADinelt wrote on 5/17/2005, 8:28 AM
It's funny you should mention about the problem being with the stills gogiants. I am starting to lean in that direction myself, although I have yet to prove anything definitely.

I do a lot of slide presentations in Vegas Movie Studio 4.0a and have noticed problems with certain images. I use an Epson 2400 scanner for scanning all of the slides and photographs. All of the images are saved to .bmp as they usually require tweaking in Photoshop Elements afterwards. It seems like the images that do not get tweaked in Elements are more prone to side effects than those that are tweaked.

An effect that I use quite a lot is applying a cookie cutter to the image to make a white border like on older photographs. Than I use the Pan/Crop to zoom and move the picture around within the border. Most of the time, it works flawlessly. But sometimes the cookie cutter border fluctuates in size as the zooming takes place. I am pretty sure that this is occurring on the images that were not tweaked in Elements. The next time it happens, I will take the image into Elements, make a small change and save it out again to see if it cures the problem.

Al
IndyGuy wrote on 5/21/2005, 10:20 AM
To add to the "confusion", at least mine, I recently put together a slide show where I used mostly images I downloaded from the internet. The exception was one picture I took with my digital camera. All of the photos were cropped in Paint Shop and resaved. ONLY the photo from my digital camera had the glittery effect when I watched the show on television. What could the difference be between downloaded images and a camera image?
gogiants wrote on 5/21/2005, 11:10 AM
There was a great post recently over on the Vegas forum on this very topic. A guy over there did a pretty exhaustive study of various techniques that have been suggested for this problem.

Based on those tests and your experience, I'm guessing that his techniques should help, especially thinking about the resolution of the original image.

Techniques 1, 3 and 4 are all available in Movie Studio.

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=392381
Elmo27376 wrote on 5/24/2005, 11:15 AM
Maybe this will help some.

After reading the impressive comments on the website recommended by gogiants I did some experimenting.

Every place I had the "glittery effect" I checked the resolution and size of the picture and found it was about 2300 X 1725 with a resolution of 230 dpi. I then found a picture where. after using Pan/Crop there was no problem and found the size was 900 X 600 with a resoluttion of 150 dpi.

I changed each problem picture to the latter size and resolution and had no problem with glitter in most cases.

In the two cases where problems persisted I added Gaussian blurr with a radius of .5 and it solved those problems.

This condition has worked on about 30 incidents and while it isn't exhaustive it may help someone.
gogiants wrote on 5/25/2005, 11:57 AM
Makes sense since, as is mentioned in the post over on the Vegas forum, when you provide a smaller resolution image to begin with then the software has to make fewer "guesses" about how to resize the image to fit in the standard TV resolution.

Also, for the record, my guess about it having to do with interlacing was pretty bogus! Interlacing would apply to motion clips, and generally isn't a factor for stills.