Somethoughts on Pan and Crop of stills

D7K wrote on 11/6/2018, 10:05 AM

I have found that on my i7700/AMD 8 gig/32 gig memory/SSD machine that the best way for me work with pan/crop for video is to start with a good still and just do my Pan and Crop on a single image and then export it to 4K video. much cleaner with no movement issues. Then I can build my video without issues. Took me about a day to figure this out but since the renders take only about half of real time it works for me. Also I can do multiple renders with just stills and NO Pan/Crop with the same results and is a lot more efficient in the long run for these projects with many stills with Pan/Crop. All P/C's are different as are other custom effects so I think this is a good work flow for project.

Comments

john_dennis wrote on 11/6/2018, 10:38 AM

"much cleaner with no movement issues."

What problems do you experience using Pan/Crop directly on the stills? Preview tearing? Less that project frame rate in the preview?

john_dennis wrote on 11/6/2018, 10:41 AM

Also, what flavor of 4K video do you use?

D7K wrote on 11/6/2018, 11:11 AM

John - I was using large stills (5000 x 4000 pixels approximately) and using Panasonic mp4 100 MB UDH 4k. Problems were "tearing" in spots, pixelation, and stuttering when rendered (1080 80 @ 50/28 data rates variable, 4K 135/100 data rates variable AMD AVC) . Problems occurred when rendering using GPU and were less but still present when not using GPU when rendering to either 4K or 1080. I found the above work flow fixed these issues and gave me great masters to work from.

However I found Occam's Razor this morning. I've never used power point but am mission critical with Outlook, Word, and Excel. So today I found out I can render a 4K slide show out of Power Point and my work load is significantly lesson, then do my final work in vegas on the 4K files. This is a fine art portfolio project with several hundred 3 minute segments (and each element needs custom sizing and such.

Thank you for your help. I decided I am going to do the first portfolio segment both ways and see what the best results are. I'll let everyone know how my

john_dennis wrote on 11/6/2018, 11:46 AM

"I've never used power point..."

I did my best to avoid it, too. But, if it produces the work product you need for this effort...

D7K wrote on 11/6/2018, 12:20 PM

John - as it turns out the PP is too low bit rate and it doesn't do P/C easily. I'm just going to render all my stills in batches. I need the full potential of the 4K format. As we all do, just a couple of more hours trying to figure the "best way" for non-standard stuff😜lost to "how to do it" the quickest and best quality way.

john_dennis wrote on 11/6/2018, 1:19 PM

I can see how getting some of the heavy-pixel-lifting out of the way might improve the workflow. I find it harder to rationalize how final quality might improve by getting the Pan/Crop out of the way. 

D7K wrote on 11/6/2018, 8:24 PM

My guess is that with very large JPEG files my system just doesn't have the horse power to crunch a lot of them down to 4K size and do the Pan and crop. I see no issues when I use movie files in 4k that I create from the large jpeg files. Since this work flow (rendering the JPEG's out first in V16 in AMD AVC for a 20 second 100 MB clip) is working fine that is what I am going with. I've done about 30 tests of this now and it's better than having to buy a new machine with many more cores and more powerful GPU. I don't need to get the Pan and Crop "out of the way" with this work flow now, I just do it on the rendered 4K AMD AVC 4k files.