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Photos animated look awful after compressing the Master to DVD
Hi, I’m a documentary filmmaker and I made a doc, 30 min. length with beautiful footage of nature. This film has two animated photos, very simple, an animation from right to left, simulating a pan. I exported the Master 1080p in ProRes HQ or Photo-JPG and looks perfect. The problem appear when I convert it to regular DVD, I did a .img file (containing VIDEO_TS & AUDIO_TS folders) to watch it in my mac with DVD Player, without burn a disc every time. And when I play it, the image looks great, except the animations of those two photos, these look awful, with a very hard alias and some kind of flicker. The animation is slow, so it is not a subject of speed. Long time ago I had a similar problem, but years than I don’t have to burn a DVD, so I don’t recall how I fixed that. I remember than It was related with the aspect ratio (square or no-square) or the interlace, or something like that. The conversion to NTSC change the structure of the photo animation and it get that alias and flicker. I really appreciate any comment or advise from somebody who got to play a photo animation in a perfect way on DVD.
Thank you in advance !! -
2 Replies
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Did you bring the HD file into Encore for transcoding? If so, I would try a different workflow. From Premiere or Media Encoder, convert to MPEG2-DVD Widescreen Progressive, with a bitrate appropriate to the program length (for 30 min., I would use CBR 8.0). Check the box for Max Render Quality as this helps with the scaling. Make sure you encode as progressive and don’t change frame rate.
Regarding the animated photos, did you start out with images larger than the Sequence? Meaning if working at 1920×1080, were the stills substantially larger to maintain quality when scaling and moving? If there is a high amount of detail in the stills, I’ve found that adding a very small amount of Gaussian Blur in Photoshop can greatly improve the animated results (no flicker in details when scaling). Use 0.1 or 0.2 setting (don’t blur the original, use a copy in case you need to go back).
Lastly, never preview a DVD on a computer to judge quality- the software used and monitor resolution can all do bad things to the output. Burn a DVD and play it on DVD or Blu-ray player connected to HD display using HDMI (never RCA analog). This is how I “proof” my DVDs, the way the client would view them. If end user is meant to view on a computer, then give them an HD-quality .mp4, no reason to view DVD on a computer really.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Thank you very much Jeff, I will follow your advises !!
Yes, in Photoshop I scaled the images to 2100px the long side (to have room to move it in AE), but i was not sure which format is better; so I tried several: JPG, PNG, TIFF, Targa.
Also, I did a copy in H.264, 1080p for the computer, but the client has the old fashioned idea, than many people going to watch the doc in the computer, using the DVD disc, for that reason he wants to see this play well in both, the TV LED screen and also the computer screen. That is the challenge now.
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