To FARSS, et al...crawls, scrolls poor motion quality

mrjhands wrote on 12/12/2004, 1:53 PM
This is an issue revisited.
I am looking again for a solution to my problem with Vegas with crawls and scrolls within Vegas, that I was HOPING Caymans CG would solve, but its the same old same old. As follows:

Just flat out POOR quality when putting crawls IN MOTION...text breaks up with scan line "ghosting" as it moves across the screen! I can NOT for the life of me get a crisp sharp horizontal crawl with VEGAS! Now, if I of course SLOW the motion down to "too slow to be useful" speed, it is BETTER, but no solution. I see crawls on network TV, and even my local news channels with weather updates, school closings, etc. just as SHARP and clear as ever, even if they are speeding along sometimes TOO fast to comprehend, but the text is oh so clean and crisp.

IS IT JUST ME??????? I don't other editing programs, but I DO use and have exported Boris and Bluff titler uncompressed crawls and the same result when I open in vegas. (Even without Vegas, when I preview with Media Player, doesnt look fantastic...)

FARSS, you and I talked on this some months ago, and conducted tests, you had a very intelligent explanation on pixel placement, some formula about even numbered pixels points when positioning the crawl when editing media...or SOMETHING and I thought you concluded you had successfully demonstrated a clean crawl....remember??

Anyway you can package a quick veg for me with NTSC standards that I may render with VEGAS and see if it helps me??? Only if its feasable, of course.

I am beginning to wonder if its a hardware thing with me, my graphics card or something, the setting within my nvidia GeForce420, its not a bad card i dont believe, HP 2 gig athlon processor, machine's barely 2 years old, 512 ram, anyway, CAYMANS CG looks great btw, but put it in motion and same ole same ole......

BTW, its basically ANYTHING that I put into motion, like a still object as a ball moving around the screen, have tried motion blur, supersampling , text size and font considerations, ad nauseam.....:-) And I have rendered and burned to DVD and played on external player with TV, to see if it cleans itself up outside of my computer...no avail :-(

THanks in AdvaNce,
John

Comments

winrockpost wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:04 PM
Is this on both computer monitor and external preview monitor ?
Jay Gladwell wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:08 PM
Have you output your motion titles to a television set or NTSC monitor? Sounds like your only viewing it on a computer screen. We use crawling titles most of time and never have any issues at all (made in Vegas).

Jay
mrjhands wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:10 PM
yep winrock, pretty much, when I PREVIEW TO PLAYER within vegas, I set it for BEST and my default player is Media Player 10, or 9 not sure, it looks as you would expect: a computer screen playing an interlaced clip, looks kinda tacky, no biggie, can expect that....I have my graphics card, dual moniter, its on CLONE MODE, TV out...I run my SVIDEO cable to my 32 inch Phillips TV, my player set to Full Screen Video mode, I look at all my work this way, I render some fantastic results and view them this way ALL THE TIME, Vegas rocks and looks great!....its just the motion aspect, mainly regarding text motion.....
Jay Gladwell wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:13 PM
Have you by change changed the order of the fields?

Jay

[Edit] "... my player set to Full Screen Video mode..." What does this mean? What "player" are you referring to?
mrjhands wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:15 PM
Jay,

I should clarify that INTERNALLY with my graphics card, my SECONDARY DEVICE (Television) is set to full screen mode, so any player on my machine, whether its QuickTime, Media Player, RealPlayer, whenever a clip is loaded, my TV launces it full screen...EVERY OTHER ASPECT of viewing rendered clips is fantastic, regarding computer generated media, just motion gets kinda ghosting, ghosted, likes it trying to outDO itself when moving, kinda separating and well, ghosting..
mrjhands wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:15 PM
OH yeah, Jay I have tried every configuration setting known to man within Vegas I SHOULD ADD, I am NOT viewing on NTSC Monitor, or using the Vegas preview on external , firewire thing...no pass thru mode nothing like that
Jay Gladwell wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:22 PM
"I am NOT viewing on NTSC Monitor, or using the Vegas preview on external , firewire thing...no pass thru mode nothing like that"

That sounds to me, and I could be wrong, like part of your problem. When I view on an external monitor using firewire, it looks fine.

Did I understand you to say that is does the samething when you burn a DVD and view that on your television?

Too, I think watching it via your "palyer" on your television is contributing to the problem. None of these player, to the best of my knowledes, were designed to play on televisions.

Jay

Jay
mrjhands wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:23 PM
YUP jay, I have burned a few mpg.s to a DVD and played back and I have the same issue...

Edit: and played back with my external DVD player hooked to my TV
mrjhands wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:26 PM
"Too, I think watching it via your "palyer" on your television is contributing to the problem. None of these player, to the best of my knowledes, were designed to play on televisions."

That stands to reason my friend, Im ok with that , but when I burn a DVD it is still present...
Jay Gladwell wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:28 PM
Is it possible that the hardware/software is creating the problem, even when you render for DVD?

Jay
winrockpost wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:29 PM
Vegas likes firewire for output preview, I think this is your problem.

Have you rendered to dv and printed to a dvcam and played that on your tv ?
mrjhands wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:30 PM
I will try another render to Mpg and reburn a clip, I will see if its something i am not doing right, It is reassuring to know that your's is fine....can you even HYPER speed your crawls and scrolls, even as a test, and although it may be too fast to be feasable, does your text still "hold together" so to speak?
John

I HAVE seen local commercials and a local Access channel displaying text scroll issues such as mine, watching regular television, just kinda crappy looking, not network TV though, I originally thought is was a DV issue, with compressing that network television maybe doesnt have, if its broadcast uncompressed...dunno
Jay Gladwell wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:32 PM
John, I have to step out for a while. If you want, contact me via e-mail at jay at gooddogproductions dot com.

Jay
mrjhands wrote on 12/12/2004, 2:33 PM
okay THANK YOU Jay!
musman wrote on 12/12/2004, 8:50 PM
I read the post about the crawls and experienced it with vegas. Did a crawl with Boris and it looks good. Even after burned to dvd.
I have noticed that rolls can get a little weird after mpeg encoding. Played with the Boris options ad nauseum (including their deflicker thing designed soley for credit rolls) and things looked good output back to minidv tape. DVD has always had a little pulsing. Vegas seems to have the same problem as well.
Different texts and bigger fonts make it less noticable but my conclusion is I'm not going to get a perfect roll. Since looking into all this, I've checked out a lot of movie rolls on digital cable. Seemed like most things not super hollywood budget made had the same kind of problems I was experiencing.
mrjhands wrote on 12/12/2004, 9:59 PM
Yah, I did a retest with generated media text and put it to motion, burned to dvd, THIS TIME, for the first time, I paid attention to the settings, and my crawl looked great. MY problem is solved. What I was missing was how I preview my work. I don't have an "external device" so to speak to preview, just my dual monitor nVidia card set to "clone" mode with my Television being my secondary source. So to preview I have to go to TOOLS/ Preview in player...and that renders an AVI that automatically brings up my Windows Media Player to autoplay, which my graphics card launches up full screen, so I thought I was seeing the real deal, when in fact I was seeing a clone of (essentially) a computer monitor playing a made for TV interlaced video clip, which we all know looks goofy on a computer screen. But because my graphics card launches to media player totally full screen, and my television is connected via SVideo, I thought I was good to go. And because previously I tested my text crawl by burning to DVD and playing thru my TV's DVD player and saw crap, I thought it was possibly the software (or me).

ANYWAY, did a new test and was blown away. It's all good now in Crawlsville. I need to get me a true Sony or similar NTSC monitor and a firewire device and be real about it, and spend a buck or two and do things right. But again, thats why this forum is great and works for me, cuz it made me revisit my problem when nobody truly could put a finger on my issue. Finally, case closed. WHEW!

Thanks for the inputs, very cool.
John
farss wrote on 12/13/2004, 12:22 AM
Sorry I wasn't able to help, kind of snowed under downunder, just typing in a 20 page EDL BY HAND, yeah I know, client not to bright, it was hard enough to get a printed copy out of their PP system.

As I read through all these post I'm thinking, "i" displayed on "p" will always look sad!

Just to summarise my experiments and conclusions, basically anything in motion will look best if it moves an integer number pixels per per frame, in other words the edge is always moving one or more pixels between each frame. Why is this so?

Well if it doesn't the edge may appear in one field only, then next frame appear in both or combinations of these. This causes mosquito noise or jitter on the leading edge and trailing edge of the object or text.
Sub Pixel rendering gets rid of this, in other words if an edge lies between two pixels then it renders a pixel at 50%, I think another term used to describe this is anti-aliasing. Motion Blur also helps this process along.
Bob.
musman wrote on 12/13/2004, 12:30 AM
I believe I've heard of anti-aliasing with regards to plug ins for photoshop. Kind of a stupid question but, is this something that can be applied to motion text in Vegas?