"My last fallback will be to print out large prints of the shots and live pan them with my camera"

That will work very well.
What you need to do is to somehow simulate exactly what happens when you do that in your workflow and it is not simple.

You can try something very simple, R Click your source media and check the Reduce Interlace Flicker box.
If that isn't to your liking then try adding Gaussian Blur to the SOURCE MEDIA. It is imperative that the resolution is reduced before scaling. Generally you will find you need more vertical GB than horizontal.

Effectively what you need to do is to provide a low pass filter, cameras do this with an Optical Low Pass Filter that lives behind the lens and in front of the sensor. That's why making a print and pointing a camera at it works so well.

If you don't mind going outside Vegas and getting really "dirty" there appears to be an excellent and free low pass filter which is way better ttan anything in Vegas available for AVI Synth. Look for posts by Nick Hope.

To the best of my knowledge there's nothing in After Effects that'll easily wrangle this problem either. The only upside to working in AE is having a true 3D camera. There maybe plugins that'll help but I'm yet to find them. AE's blur tools seem to lack any ability to get a blur that's adjustable in the vertical and horizontal axis, bit of a win for Vegas there.

Bob.

BCC-7 has a motion blur tool that I haven't used yet, but understand to be excellent. I'm getting ready to do a job that I wanted to use this effect on (a commercial for a local storage rental place) so I am pretty interested in this. My plan was to stitch together panoramas using Zoner Pro and animate fast pans across the panoramic photos.

I know this is heresy, but if you could deliver at 1280x720-60p, it will be a lot smoother. Since you are starting with stills the only concern is the expected resolution and the delivery method. You could deliver 1280x720-60p on Blu-ray with a custom template.

Edit:

I ran some tests of various pixel dimensions and frame rate. Though 60p looks cleaner to my eye, 60i should produce good results.

Examples:

1080-60i

720-60p

1080-60p

Please post Vegas version, project and render settings.

P.S.
I'm submitting this herring bone material to compete with Jerry's Hula Doll.

Thoughts? Settings?What version of Vegas are you using? If you are using any version other than Vegas 11, send the VEG file to me and I'll see if I can spot what is causing the problem. (Send one or two stills as well).

I have done probably 100+ "Ken Burns" pan/scan animated stills projects (delivered on interlaced NTSC DVDs), and I've never had any problems with interlacing or any other artifacts. I have, however, often had "shimmering." See steps below to get the best results when using still photos.

You've been using Vegas a long time, so the following are probably too simple for you, but just in case you overlooked something, here goes.

1. Do your pans using the event pan/crop tool. Do NOT, under any circumstance, use track motion to pan or zoom your photos.

2. Make sure each event's resample is set to anything except "Disable." The default "Smart Resample" will work just fine.

3. Optional (this won't help much, but it might help a little): for each event, make sure to check "Reduce interlace flicker." I have a script I can send that will do this for all selected events.

4. Make sure the "field order" for each still photo event is set to "Progressive." This is the default, but perhaps something changed it.

Finally, sometimes you can get better quality with still photos by down-res'ng them first in your photo editor. When I do this, I first calculate how far into the photo I think I will zoom. This calculation has to take into account the zoom that happens when you "match aspect ratio." I then down-res to the project resolution, multiplied by this zoom factor. Doing this will reduce the shimmer you sometimes get with really high-res photos. Try doing this on a few photos and render all the way through to your final delivery format and see if the results look better.

(Vegas should be able to do this on its own, but I have found -- at least in earlier version of Vegas -- that I can eliminate a lot of the "issues" of panning a zooming images when I do this.)

Oh, and when you are saving (from your photo editing software) your still photos for use in Vegas, if you have a choice, and don't mind the extra disk space, save them as PNG rather than JPEG. Vegas seems to be "happier" with this format and, goodness knows, these days we all need to do what we can to keep Vegas "happy."

thank you all for your time and your generous support.
I will post video and print reports of my progress.
not editing on this project until end of week.
until then... thanks so much

I've seen similar side effects when I Pan / Zoom lower resolution images that contain complex patterns such as stripes on clothing, grass, gravel, etc.

I've had luck reducing this by enabling the Video Bus track and adding a Motion Blur envelope. A motion blur setting of 7 or more frames within the problem event has really worked out great for me.

I did one of those "stitch photos together in a panorama and pan across it in Vegas" shots in this video (third shot, about 2 seconds in):

http://vimeo.com/36743346

No motion blur. Do you think I need it?

"No motion blur. Do you think I need it? "

It's so short hard to tell which I think means No.

I did notice staircasing on powerlines which was a bit visually distracting and I felt some parts were cut too close to the bone. I know, very little time to get the message over but it felt a bit rushed.

Bob.

No one asked the first question.. Why are you working with interlaced output?

Like Steve said.... The project properties should be progressive with no deinterlace method selected. If that doesn't match the rest of your project, you'll have to do it with a nested project where the nested animation is progressive without a deinterlace method selected. When you are doing this sort of thing, selecting no deinterlace method is really important. Otherwise Vegas will try to split the image into even and odd fields on the resize (or pan in your case) which will give you something like you are describing.

Where do I get such a script?
Is it something you can email me?

Also... any suggestions on a resource for learning how to use scripts... never done it.

Much thanks!

Greg
hookandpan@yahoo.com

> "No one asked the first question.. Why are you working with interlaced output?"

...and is your project set to Progressive? I do photo montages all the time with pans and both my project and output are always set to Progressive so that there are no interlace problems.

As Laurence said, if this doesn't match the rest of your project, use a nested project and Vegas will treat it like any other piece of progressive footage.

~jr

Try rendering at 59.94 fps (2XNTSC) as a WMV file. That smoothed out my pans of big Canon 18 megapixel still shots. It also smoothed out Scattershot projects.

"I do photo montages all the time with pans and both my project and output are always set to Progressive so that there are no interlace problems."

Been there, tried that. The problem is it will still be sent by the DVD player to the TV as interlaced. CRT based TVs generally cannot display progressive without interlacing it.

Bob.