Stills on the timeline

PeterMac wrote on 10/3/2002, 4:54 PM

I want to add to the timeline some stills images taken with a 5Mp digital camera. By partially overlapping the endpoints of these images I want to reproduce the effect of a twin-projector slide show. I then propose to render the timeline to MPEG2 and put it on a DVD.
Alas, when I do this some images are super, but some are ghastly with lots of shimmer and flicker. The bad images tend to have lots of fine detail in high contrast and the overall effect is like super-moire.
If anyone has experienced this and found a way to overcome it, I would be very grateful for any guidance. I should mention that I have tried setting the 'reduce interlace flicker' and 'resample' switches, but it doesn't help greatly. (I have not resized the images in Photoshop since Vegas seems to make a pretty good fist of it).

-Pete

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/3/2002, 4:59 PM

The problem you're seeing is Vegas NOT doing well at resizing. At least with the images you're having the most trouble with, try resizing in Photoshop first. If you're in NTSC land, the desired size is 655x480 pixels. You might also try softening them just a bit before importing them into Vegas to cut down on the sharp details.

redwards23 wrote on 10/3/2002, 7:33 PM

I just went through this. Thanks to this forum, I tried two things: set the bit rate to constant 6MBPS, and set the DC Coefficient to 10-bit. On a timeline of fifty stills with edited transitions, three of them buzzed like crazy before doing this. Afterwards, perfect. This setting is probably higher than necessary for stills, but I'm not always in the mood to test, and it works.

PeterMac wrote on 10/4/2002, 7:41 AM

Thanks, old boy

As a test, I reduced the worst images in Photoshop to the nearest I could get to 787x576 (PAL), (they're all sorts of shapes and sizes).
That alone effected a very major improvement. One or two still proved a little intractable so I turned on the interlace switch, which had the persuasive effect of a knee in the groin. In fact, they now look very good indeed with no perceptible flicker at all.
I also experimented with PNG, as opposed to JPG, but I couldn't honestly say I could see any difference.
The only downside is the enormous amount of rendering required; I think Vegas actually renders the whole timeline.
Still, what matters are the results, eh?

Many thanks again for your help. I really am most grateful.

-Pete

PeterMac wrote on 10/4/2002, 7:43 AM

Please see my note to Chienworks.
I hadn't even got to the MPEG2 stage; these problems were still in AVI ;)

However, I will bear your points in mind when I do encode; they look good sense to me.

-Pete