Jittering in 3D shot

[Rob White]

I commonly have this same problem. I think at this stage, we are using very high resolution things and our pro-sumer software just isn’t keeping up with us. If the image you are using does not need to be the resolution that it’s at you could try reducing that. I remember asking a similar Question and Mr. Laronde suggested to stay away from cameras and use the 2D world.

And I said…No. I just had to live with a couple choppy shots. Only nerds like us will care anyways.
Oh and our bosses…doh.

You could also try curving motion paths or speeding/slowing camera moves, slightly changing the focal point. There’s some other settings kind of stuff I found a while ago, something with color space. I don’t remember.

This is totally unhelpful, but I’m here for moral support.

cheers.
-r

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Most likely you encounter the jitter with fine detail because some of the artwork detail is close to a pixel or under. It’s not the software but the resolution you’re working at. The fix is usually applying a fast blur of anywhere from .3 to .7.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Alex Kuzelicki]

Hey Rob,

Thanks for the moral support. There’s some comfort in knowing others are suffering too 🙂

I did some more research and found that besides the high-rez of images causing the jitter, another possible cause is having two layers too close together in 3D space… though that wasn’t my particular problem. Maybe someone reading this might benefit though.

In the end, I did a bunch of tests with different blurs and was able to reduce the flicker – not totally – but to a level I can live with. Then I read Tudor’s reply which confirmed the solution. Fast Blur works good.

Hopefully, this will help someone else with a similar problem.

Does Creative Cow have a ‘knowledge bank’ kind of thing? Like a list of solutions to common problems. I know you can search posts but it seems the same problems come up for a lot of people. Would be good to go to a page, look up “Jittering/Flickering” and get definitive solutions.

Can’t complain with the help I’ve gotten from this site though. It’s an awesome community.

Cheers,

ALEX

[Alex Kuzelicki]

Hey Tudor,

Thanks for that suggestion. Was in the midst of trying different blurs when I read your reply. Your Fast Blur solution definitely reduced a lot of the flicker.

I have a Blackmagic card that lets me see ‘everything’ on my monitor which actually was a bad thing in this case.

The clip in question is only ever going to be seen on computer monitors, where it looks fine, so I’ve been spending lots of time trying to fix an irrelevant problem.

Then again… it’s good to know how to fix things (for future reference).

Thanks for your helpful advice.

Appreciated,

ALEX

[Michael Szalapski]

If you were previewing through a Blackmagic card on a broadcast monitor, it’s possible that you were also viewing artifacts of interlacing which is also a trickster when it comes to fine detail.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Alex Kuzelicki]

Hey Michael,

Good point. The footage is DVCPro 1080i, so that would make sense.

Cheers for that.

ALEX