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Rendering 2D animation in Vegas – horrible “ghosting” between frames.
Hello all.
I recently landed my first pro animation job and am in rather urgent need of your assistance. The job calls for me to deliver my animations at standard PAL 25 frames per second. I’ve done plenty of personal animations for Youtube and the like, but never at 25 frames per seconds for the reason mentioned next:
Basically, rendering an animation in Vegas (I’m using Pro 9.0) at anything other than 22 frames per second (a totally non industry standard setting and unacceptable to my employers) creates strange “ghost” images between the frames. This wouldn’t be a problem, but I composite my animations using chroma keying in Vegas to place characters onto backgrounds, so this strange ghost effect plays havoc with the chroma keying and renders the animation a horrible mess.
To clearer illustrate my problem, here are some screencaps.
So, I animated this generic anime girl hitting things with a stick: https://i.imgur.com/qQThl.gif
I then composite that onto a background in Vegas, using chroma key to eliminate the purple. So far so good: https://i.imgur.com/s4Sk3.jpg
But when rendering, Vegas adds in ghost frames between the frames I’ve drawn, which messes up the chroma keying and results in this: https://i.imgur.com/nttWd.jpg
I’ve been wrestling with this problem for a few years now, and eventually settled on rendering my animations at 22 frames per second, as this produces no “ghosting” and leaves the animation looking exactly as I drew it in each frame. This will no longer work though, as my employers require that I deliver at a usable standard such as PAL (25 frames per second).
I’ve tried every setting I can think of, and the result still looks the same. here are the settings I’m using:
Project settings: https://i.imgur.com/Gyqzw.jpg
Render settings: https://i.imgur.com/IohSb.jpgAny help that anyone could offer would be greatly appreciated. Even links to other forums. I’ll take anything at this point! Surely, everyone renders out of Vegas at PAL or NTSC framerates, don’t they? So somebody must have run into this problem? As I have been told, NOBODY uses 22 frames per second (only me!), so how are other animators getting around this problem?
Paul J.
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10 Replies
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Ok Paul….First, try changing only the Deinterlace Method in
project properties and along with the same in the render output
settings and see what happens.Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Maker
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956
https://filmex-creative-media.blogspot.com/ -
Hi Steve,
Thanks for responding!
Um, I’m a bit confused though… are you saying to make sure the deinterlace method settings are the same in Project Properties and Render Settings? Because there is no Deinterlace Method setting in the render output settings…Paul J
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Yes..The render settings do have where to select it, you simply
go into custom and it is their as the field order.
(Same in project settings…same in render output0.Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Maker
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956
https://filmex-creative-media.blogspot.com/ -
Aha, I see!
Yes, they are both the same in both locations: https://i.imgur.com/UxGmG.jpg
“None – progressive scan” in both render settings and project properties.Sadly, when I render it still comes out the same as before though.
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How are you creating the source animation? As an animated GIF?
I notice that the frame display time in the sample GIF varies from frame to frame, and none of the delays correspond to normal video frame rates.
If you need to keep creating the animation in this way, then you can get around the ghosting problem quite easily in Vegas, but with the possible drawback of slight stutter in the animation.
Just drop the animation file into your Vegas project (set up for 25fps progressive), right-click on the event and select Switches > Disable Resample. That will turn off the resampling that Vegas performs by default in an effort to fill in gaps in the video when the frame rates do not match.
I just tried that on your sample, rendered to a 640x480x25p MP4 and it looked fine.
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I told you to try changing the field order Paul.
And if that don’t work, Disable Resample as Matt recommended.Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Maker
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956
https://filmex-creative-media.blogspot.com/ -
Hi Matt,
I can’t thank you enough. Your instructions worked perfectly! I’ve done a few tests and the ghosting issue is utterly resolved. I’m crossing my fingers that this animation stuttering issue you warned about won’t crop up!
You’re quite right; I am using animated gifs and compositing them onto backgrounds. The timing of each frame of the gif can be very different as I tailor the timing for smoothest effect, leading to the strange framerate issues. I also have gifs on top of gifs… one will be a head, for instance, with a separate animation of eyes blinking and another for mouth movements etc.
One question though – is there any way to disable resample across a whole project, or do I have to right click and apply this manually to each gif in the project? I only ask because currently the one minute scene I am working on looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/FfHMH.jpg
So… manually applying to each gif will take a long time indeed! Heheh. And manually applying to every gif in the 30 minutes of total animation… doesn’t bear thinking about…
Thanks again!
Paul J
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You can almost certainly do the “disable resample” with Vegas scripting, but I don’t know much about that as I only use Movie Studio.
I think you can do the “disable resample” globally by selecting all video (anim GIF) events with the selection tool, and right-click > disable resample. Make sure you don’t also have any audio selected or you won’t get the resample options on the context menu.
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To disable across an entire project, here is a quick
method to do so, recommended by Mike sometime ago:Click the first clip and shift+click the last one to
select all the clips in your project.
Right-click anywhere and select Switches – Disable Resample.Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Maker
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956
https://filmex-creative-media.blogspot.com/ -
Thanks guys. The whole project is now moving along much smoother. You’ve saved my bacon.
Cheers!
PJ
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