Farss, not seeing the work, I'll suggest you might consider turning on Force resample, and rendering to BEST setting. Is it possible you've cropped the PIP image with Quantize to frames turned off, thus potentially creating a blend of fields?
Is the PIP moving? If so, you might want to consider using a Super Sample envelope where the PIP is moving.

Try reduce interlace flicker on a short segment - it works for me.

Udi hit it in one.
Thanks everyone for the input, I ran a few tests. Just so we all learn here's what it is and what I found.

It's a .png still, basically the clients logo and contact details with a short version of the main video running in a window. Target is video kiosks. This avi ends up as a looping background on the DVD. At first i thought the problem was created when I had to let DVDA encode what was already mpeg. I went back and redid it as I saw another minor issue but the problem didn't go away.

So then I decided to run a test on a short section. Setting render to 'best' made not a shred of difference apart from taking forever. Ticking 'Reduce Interlace Flicker' on the video media sure did!

Thanks for all the prompt replies, this job is for my first potential commercial customer who actually has money to spend. Sure not Oscar material but it'll make all my previous unpaid hard work justified.

Glad you raised this Bob - I have a couple of segments where I've used pan crop to resize and move clips so they "peep through" a still using Cookie Cutter - and they've looked a bit "artefacty".

I was going to try best rendering, but based on your experience (and thanks Udi) I'll try reducing interlace flicker when I get back to it in the morning.

cheers

Peter

sORRY, i mis read and had the idea that the PIP was video.

SPOT,
you didn't misread, it is video inside a window in a still. The still(.png) part renders fine, it was the resized video that had all the artifacts. Just how 'reduce interlace flicker' fixes the problem I don't know. Maybe because I was still using 'smart resample' which didn't resample until I turned on 'reduce interlace flicker'

Problem is certainly fixed but I have no logical explanation as to why.
Footage was shot on PD150, all PAL so nothing odd there, edited on a Casablanca Krone (now that IS a bit odd) and given to me as standard DV.

I've had this problem before with footage from the telecine. I thought it might have had something to do with how it was transfered, but again the footage looked fine until it was resized. Again the 'reduce interlace flicker' fixed it. In this case I had huge artifacts, I mean maybe 20 lines high that looked like they were caused by interlacing. Add the slightest amount of blur or the reduce interlace flicker switch fixed it so maybe the underlying issue is the resampling but that doesn't make much sense either. Surely if VV has to resixe something then it has to resample?

I assume by resample they mean decompress and render?

I truly wish the manuals / help was a bit more informative.

Farss, I've had this same problem before. I spent a week rendering with different setting combos (different fields, resampling, reduct flicker, etc). and found that reduce interlace flick was the only thing that made it better, but.... it didn't completly fix it. I could still that there was interlace artifacts durring high motion scenes ( like the sprinters that were on screen for a few seconds, close up!).

I found out the problem was caused because when I scaled the image down, some of the upper fields were dropped, some of the lower were dropped (in the rescale).

I found 2 solutions that seem to always "work." The first one way was to scale by 1/2 of the verticle resolution (that means only 360x240 works good). The other way was to render my footage to be scaled down as progressive. Yes, I know one field will be dropped, but if you're scaling it down and playing on DVD it should look ok.

And, yeah, I know when you're reducing the scale by 1/2 you're also making it progressive, but it works. :)

I use the progressive scan method when I want to do that because it's easier then rescaling everything to 1/2 size. I don't think it's an error with the NLE eigther. I think it's an interlaced format limit. I've messed with progressive footage (off a comercial DVD) to see if I get the same problem and I didn't.

I hope this helps!

That's very interesting.
Let me first point out that our far from cutting edge MX50 mixers manage to achieve this in real time with no artifacts. Given their age VV should be able to eat this.

What I imagine should be happening is each field is converted to a frame using bicubic transformation (maybe this needs to done at an even higher res than 720x576) to up the res (ie fill in the nissing lines) then scaled down and then converted back to interlaced.

Clealry this has got a better chance of working with progressive material.

This is kind of important to me, I should be using it a lot to resize my telecine footage so the client gets to see as much as possible of the frame. I omly do it at the moment when they're going to loose something vital because it takes so much time to render and involves a process that I don't think is working right in VV.

Your results seem to confirm that even my 'fix' is a bit dodgy. Guess I could always buy an MX50, just where to put it would be an issue.