flicker/movement in still images

[Tom Wolsky]

Full specs on the images would be helpful. They’re probably too high a resolution and are producing patterning in the interlacing. A one pixel vertical motion blur might help.

All the best,

Tom

Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy” DVDs

[Sara Iyer]

Hi,
Thanks for replying so quickly. The images where the shimmer is most pronounced are 2473×1677, 2272×1704, and 2549×1848….. pretty big. I tried the motion blur but it didn’t do anything. I’ll try playing around with the motion blur, maybe increasing it to a certain point, and see if that works. If you have any more suggestions, keep ’em coming 🙂

[Ben Holmes]

Might be teaching you to suck eggs, but you ARE viewing this on a monitor, not the canvas? The canvas itself does not display the full resolution image, and it’s not interlaced. You may find that you do not see this effect on the proper output.

Apologies if this is no use – It’s just that complaints about the quality of stills or gfx are common on FCP and are usually due to the operator looking at the canvas, not a monitor. I know I used to when I started….

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd

EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations. FCP systems just used on Sky Sports coverage of the Ryder Cup – live from the K Club.

“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com

[Sara Iyer]

Thanks for the suggestion! It looks a bit better on the monitor, however there is still a little bit of shimmer and on the black and white images there is some sort of coloring or rainbow effect going on in certain areas…. Could this “rainbowing” be due to the quality of the monitor?

It does look better than on the canvas though, thanks for the help

[Ben Holmes]

The rainbowing does sound like a monitor issue – sounds like you have a magnetised tube. Check there are no speakers or similar near it. If it’s a pro monitor, de-gauss it.

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd

EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations. FCP systems just used on Sky Sports coverage of the Ryder Cup – live from the K Club.

“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com

[Tom Matthies]

Reduce those still down to a more useable size. I’m betting that this is your problem. Unless you are doing extensive pan’n scan type moves those stills are much bigger than you need. Go into Photoshop (if you have it) and resize them to something more in the neighborhood of 1440 pixels (horizontal) at 72dpi. This will give you an image that is still large enough to do movement on, but not so large as ti introduce such severe interfield flicker. I’ll bet it will kill most if not all of your flicker problem. I am of course assuming that you are using a standard size for your screen dimensions (720×480?) and not planning on showing these images on something the size of a billboard!
Tom

[Tim Rice]

If you don’t have Photoshop, The Gimp works nicely also…
and it’s free!
Tim

[Neil Ryan]

quote “at 72dpi”

The dpi setting is irrelevant.
Just set the pixels to be what you want.

Neil.

[Chuck Reti]

I had to do some pans/zooms of scans of old woodcuts that had lots of fine line detail, so you can imagine how shimmery those were on all displays. Motion blur in FCP for some reason didn’t help too much. After making a safety copy of the original images, I opened them in Photoshop, and applied a very slight Gaussian Blur. This did the trick in every instance and the pictures looked fine.

[Bobby Holbrook ii]

72dpi works best with video.