Juddering stills

[Roadkill]

Tim,

Always leave “Optimize Stills” off! It doesn’t optimize stills, but it tries to optimize harddisk space usage of stills, which is hardly relevant with today’s harddisk sizes, while it creates compatibility problems in other applications like Adobe’s own Encore.

If the juddering stills are really still, the problem could be that it contains thin horizontal lines and sharp contrast changes. Because TVs and video monitors are (usually) interlaced displays, thin lines will be displayed only half of the time – switching on and off 25 or 30 times per second. It may help to have a look at:
Adapting print graphics for video
Why you need fuzzy titles and a good codec

If there is some movement in the stills (e.g. the crawling text) the problem can also be caused by an incorrect field order setting.

[Tim Bond]

Hi Roadkill,
thanks for coming back to me (again!). As the still is a single video frame would it be necesary to deinterlace it first? Do you think exporting the single frame as .tif or similar into After Effects then stretching it and re-importing it as an .avi be the way to go? I was hoping there might be an easier way to do this!
Thanks,
Tim

[Roadkill]

Tim,

Deinterlacing or using the “flicker removal” filter in Premiere may lessen the juddering. What either option does is making thin horizontal lines and sharp edges softer. That will help to get rid of some of the flickering.

My guess about what is the problem could be off; without having seen what you are seeing we could be talking about entirely different phenomena… 😉

[Tim Bond]

Hi Roadkill,
thanks for the help – plenty of food for thought. Time to get experimenting, try a few things and burn a few coasters.
Tim