I've got Proshow Gold which I use quite a lot on photo projects. I had it before Proshow Producer ever came out. I didn't upgrade to Producer because 1) I remember the price being a lot higher than it is now and 2) I couldn't justify spending the bucks on features that weren't that important to me. It takes no time at all to throw together a great looking photo montage, much quicker than what it take to do the same thing in Vegas (without any of scripting add-ons like UltimateS) imho. The only thing I didn't care for was not being able to export to avi out of Proshow Gold. That may have changed with more recent versions.

Vegas gives excellent results if you have the correct settings
Perhaps you can elaborate on that a little David...or maybe point to a tut on those settings.
I've had problems with very high res stills also as soon as I start to use pan/crop or track motion.
Thanks,
Randy

I have ultimate S and when I use the montage portion especially with pics using track motion to have three moving across screen all of them flicker. But I agree I may have my settings wrong. Most of my photos crom from cannon rebel at about 7 mp. Proshow Producer is about $300 which is a lot for this app. But If it were to make wedding montages better and easier, it would pay for itself sooner or later. I just do not want to spend money for something in one app when vegas could do it (if only I got better). What setting do you use

If your flicker is in the rendered output file then check to see if you have Reduce Interlace Flicker checked in UltimateS.

If the flicker is in the preview window, then the resolution of the photos might be too high. Use the Search in this forum for more details, but basically you can run into problems if your photos are sized higher than 2000 x 2000 pixels.

99% of the time I'm scanning a client's photos, not downloading from a digital cam; you may need to resize each image to be closer to 2k x 2k if that's the problem. I scan at 300dpi, sometimes 600 dpi if it is a really small photo. I check the box for Reduce Interlace Flicker and Maintain Aspect Ratio (NTSC DV) in UltimateS and....that's about it. Nothing special really.

Old post I did on flicker reduction:

Still photo flicker reduction

Thanks John for that exhaustive info! I'm glad you mentioned Best Render, I forgot to add that we always use Best when rendering stills.

The general rule of thumb is to have your pictures be no more than twice your final resolution (unless you are doing some extreme zooming). So if you final output is NTSC 720x480 (which is less than 1MP) you only need 1440x960 resolution. Your 7MP camera output is far too large.

Vegas is first and foremost a video editor not photo editor. Which do you think will do a better job of resizing your photo from 7MB to less than 1MP... Vegas? or Photoshop? I would recommend you resize you photos in a photo editor before using them in Vegas. Most photo editors have a batch processing mode that can do this quickly.

The thing that causes flicker is very thin lines in interlaced video. First make sure you enable Reduce Interlace Flicker. Then you might want to also enable Force Resample (although the change in resolution will force this anyway). Finally if those two don't do enough to reduce flicker, you can add a slight Gaussian Blur (0.002) to just smooth those fine lines over.

One other suggestion is to make your photo montage projects progressive scan since photos are not interlaced. This will make them look a lot better on a computer monitor or on a progressive scan TV.

~jr

The Reduce Interlace Flicker switch does too much harm to image quality. Maybe it doesn't look so bad in NTSC but it sure looks pretty soft by PAL standards.
The same applies to the same switch in DVDA for menus.

Bob.

OK, maybe this is an option for a valuable WARNING to appear: "Hey, yah really wanna put a picture of that reso in? Are you SERIOUS?" - well you get the picture - or not, as the case may be.

This comes up with so much regularity, with mixed formats and resos that surely this would be a "keeper" to make for either thems-upstairs or one of our Script Gurus? "Grazie, get real! You KNOW that is far too big for this project!! Change it! NOW!"

Rule of thumb? OK, it's only Math. Now make a "message" solution for it.

Grazie

. . so many ideas . . so little ti . . . . .

Yes,
image too big is probably not that important, I've had no problem with 100s of massive stills on the T/L. What you really should have a warning for is missmatched audio sample rates and vision frame rates. Both those have subtle impacts like poor audio quality if you don't change project settings or degraded image quality and preview performance. Users can end up blaming the software for the wrong reasons.

Only thing is I can't see such actions being scriptable, the script would basically be modifying Vegas's behaviour and I can SCS allowing that opening a real can of worms. A script that the user runs would be fine but probably if you were clued up enough to run the script you'd perhaps not need it anyway.

Bob.