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Best Workflow for Timelapse
I’ve had problems with timelapse workflow. I’ve tried importing a sequence of high res JPGs into Lightroom, exporting to Quicktime and rendering the sequence of stills to .mov and then import to Vegas Pro 12. I’ve tried to go directly to Vegas Pro 12. I’ve tried to go from Lightroom to Vegas Pro and from Quicktime to VP12. All were rendered to very high resolution. I’ve used different codecs,(resizing to 1080p, 24p, 16×9.) including Avid DNxHD. These various renders have made files of up to 210mg for a 10 second clip. So, I know that I’m not scrimping on quality.
THE PROBLEM IS:
When it gets to the timeline, it has artifacts that are unacceptable. It looks like a terribly compressed file. ONLY I KNOW IT’S NOT. The file is BIG. I thought that maybe the problem was in PREVIEW, so I rendered to BLURAY. IT LOOKED TERRIBLE IN BLURAY TOO.
So, I’m asking what is the best way to preserve quality when using a sequence of JPGs for a timelapse sequence.
What WORKFLOW do you recommend to retain high quality for TIMELAPSE????? Please be specific.
Thanks so much. -
5 Replies
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Jpeg sizes?
Project properties: full resolution rendering quality?If your stills are larger than your project then full resolution rendering quality must be Best. It defaults to Good. The only difference between Good and Best is image interpolation quality and this(interpolation) happens with large stills being resized down to the project dimensions. Also, having GPU enabled can greatly enhance preview video quality since you get a higher quality interpolation with GPU than the preview level normally gets.
On a side note. Vegas performance can slow down with large stills with pans/crops/zoom. On a stills project I did with 12MP stills I batch resized them to about 4.3MP. A few were left full size as they had big zooms. You can use Irfanview or I used Photoshop to easily do a batch resize.
I have only ever rendered an 1440×1080 24fps progressive stills project. My edit/playback window is set to preview(half) and it is sized to exactly half. I turned preview window scaling off. This just minimized the number of interpolations for best quality preview. It does not affect render as. My render as, was to AVC (Sony or MC) and anywhere from 8Mbps an up bitrate looks great.
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[Jerry Hart] “What WORKFLOW do you recommend to retain high quality for TIMELAPSE????? Please be specific.”
HD is 1 mega pixel. If you are feeding 12 megapixel images into a video editing program and expecting it to do a great job at resizing them 12x down to 1MP, you are asking for a lot. Take your favorite image editing program and resize the images down to 1920×1080 and then open them as an image sequence in Vegas Pro. They will look fantastic.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
You need to resize those images (also as John advised), and everything will be ok.
Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia
1-876-461-9019 -
HD 1080 is actually about 2MP.
If you are not doing any crop/pan/zoom then resizing the stills to your project size, say 1920×1080, makes sense. Otherwise leave some room so your crop size never goes below your project size. Otherwise you are magnifying which loses detail.
This is why I sized to about 4.3MP (2400×1800). It left room for crops and no crop goes smaller than a 1080 height which was my project size. Vegas performs well with this image size on my 2.9Ghz machine, and I had more than enough room/freedom to do what I wanted with crops.
On Best quality render setting, Vegas uses Bicubic interpolation which is the same general algorithm Photoshop uses, and Vegas does a good job IMO. Good quality uses Bilinear interpolation. Of course saying the algorithm is the same is not to say they are identical. Only quite similar.
When resizing in Irfanview or Photoshop or whatever, use a very high quality setting. In Photoshop setting 10 or 11. Irfanview 92+ percent, and disable chroma subsampling. You are just trying to keep the compression level similar to that of the digital camera source, which is very minimal compression.
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You’re right. HD is 2MP. My mistake. Still way smaller than the 12 – 15MP that still image cameras shoot today. Also a good point about Best vs Good. Always use Best when resizing content. Good advice.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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