Project Properties/ Media Properties

eejackson wrote on 11/7/2003, 7:45 PM

Hi all, I know I'm probably making you all crazy with these newbie questions about using stills, but about 90% of the work I do for my customers is made up of scanned or digital photos taken from a photo CD. Ok here goes.

In an earlier post, I was having trouble with very evident artifacts on my stills. Thanks to the forum, that issue was resolved by changing media and project properties. That project consisted of only stills so everthing was fine. Now, I started a new project, which constist of scanned stills, AVI's created in Ulead Cool 3D, and captured video from a Sony analog camcorder using a Canopus ADVC-100. When I have all of these different medias on the timeline, I end up with artifacts either on all the stills OR on the video clips depending on how the project properties are set. To include all of the mentioned media in one project on the same timeline, could someone please tell me what the Project Property settings should be for:
1. Field Order
2. Pixel Aspect Ratio
3. Full Resolution Rendering Quality
4. DeInterlaced Method

Also, do I need to change the media properties of the stills to match the video properties ( or vice versa). Should it be a rule of thumb that the media properties of all media on the timeline should match the Project Properties???????

Then under the Render As menu, do I need to change any of the entries in the Custom settings?

If I am rendering a file for use in DVD Architect, do I use MPEG-2 with the DVD NTSC template?

It seems that no matter how I set the properties or choose my render settings, I can only get either the stills to render OK or the video to render OK, but never both. I'm sure I'm just not choosing the proper settings.

I can't tell you how grateful I would be if someone could answere these questions!!!!!!

Thanks,
Lori J.

Comments

randy-stewart wrote on 11/8/2003, 12:50 PM

Lori,
I don't change the media properties of the stills to match the project. Just bring them in as JPEG add transitions, pan/crop, and music. I do check match output aspect in the pan/crop FX so that the picture fills the screen. As for the rendering problems, I'll throw out some ideas to help with your troubleshooting. First, I'd set everything (properties) back to default. Render to the default DV template and then look at it on a TV (you will have to print to tape if you don't have a TV monitor hooked up) vice your computer monitor. Sometimes the artifacts around pictures (I call it combing) show up on your computer monitor (not interlaced) but don't show up on a TV (interlaced). If that doesn't work, re-render to the DV template but go into the custom settings and set output to best and, under the video tab, set the field level to none-progressive scan. Again, view the result on the TV to see if that fixes the problem. If it doesn't, try rendering under the Windows Media Video-9 template under the default settings (use 256K for streaming or higher up to 3mbps for TV viewing) to see how that turns out. Hope one of those options work. I can't tell you the technical reasons but one of them usually works for me when I combine photos and video on the timeline.

As for rendering for DVD, yes, use the MPEG-2 for DVD template with best selected under the quality settings. You shouldn't have to change anything else.
Randy

eejackson wrote on 11/8/2003, 1:25 PM

Thanks Randy, I'll give your advice a try. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond.
Lori J.