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smooth pan on high-res still?
Hello All,
I have been searching EVERYWHERE for a solution to this problem:
I’m trying to do a simple move from left to right on a still of a schematic. I’m using AE 6.5 and creating a 1280X720 .mov for FCP5. I’ve tried various settings in the Render and Output controls, but nothing seems to give me a smooth pan. The finer lines get all jumpy as well as the text. Is there any solution withing AE, besides a “jimmy-rig” blur? The client maked HD equipment, so there’s no hiding the jumps.
I’ve also tried Boris Continuum Complete 5’s new Pan & Zoom to no avail.
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!Thanks in advance.
Robert
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7 Replies
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That’s an interlacing issue right there. If I’m correct, only the thin horizontal lines are jumpy, right? If so, you’re in luck. There’s a wonderful little built-in effect called “reduce interlace flicker” that fixes just this problem. Throw that sucker on your schematic layer and set it to between 0.5 and 1 (if the layer is scaled to 100%… if it’s scaled down, you might need to go higher). I use this effect so much, that I put a duplicate in my Premiere Pro plugins folder, and use it in there all the time. What it does is applies just a slight amount of vertical gaussian blur. 0.5 will be good enough for most problems, 1.0 will stop interlace flicker dead in its tracks (only go higher if you are scaling down the image).
Hope this helps. If it’s not that, then I’d have to see it to get a better picture of what we’re dealing with.
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Well thanks for the suggestion, but it actually looks like both a horizontal and a vertical issue. The image is scaled down to 35%.Doing a slower move helped a little, but nothing like what I expected from AE.
Please let me know how I can post an image for you to take a look at. I’m stumped on this one and the project needs to GO!
Thanks again. -
in addition to what’s been mentioned, you may need to restrict the move to whole pixels to prevent anti-aliasing from rendering the lines differently from frame to frame.
this expression will help to keep the movement to whole pixels:
[Math.round(position[0]),Math.round(position[1])]
it’s simple, but the downside can be potentially uneven movement due to rounding off of values.
you can get more complex with something like this:
xRate = 1;
yRate = 1;
x = position.value[0] – ((time / thisComp.frameDuration) * xRate);
y = position.value[1] – ((time / thisComp.frameDuration) * yRate);
[x, y]this expression will ignore any keyframed positions, and base the movement on the xRate and/or yRate which are simply the number of whole pixels that the layer will move per frame. if you need the layer to move in the opposite direction, enter a negative value for the rate variable. note that if your move is in the y direction and you need to render with fields, you will want the yRate value to be an even number (essentially 1 pixel per field).
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Well I appreciate the post, but for now, expressions are a bit out of my league. I’d love to know more about it though.
As for the other replies, I’m playing back a movie that I rendered with no field dominance on a timeline in FCP5 with no field dominance. The hard drives are SATAs, so speed should not be an issue. I guess I’ll try the vertical blur and see what happens.
Once again- thanks for the suggestions! -
if you are rendering progressive, and your motion is a horizontal pan, then the vertical blur may not make any difference. the vertical blur trick is to help with problems with interlacing and fine horizontal lines/details.
with uncompressed hd at high frame rates, you actually could exceed the sustained data rate of a sata drive, even a sata raid, unless you have a 4-8 drive raid. so if you are seeing stutters in play back that seem like the media is hanging, then you might want to try rendering to a compressed codec. are you viewing the media in a player, like quicktime, or in an nle?
expressions can be intimidating at first, but they can help a lot… they aren’t to hard to use either, you can just copy and paste them in to the expression field. if the problem is the fine lines/details that are perpendicular to the move of the layer are giving you probelms (so if the vertical lines give you problems as the image pans across the screen) then the issue may be the aliasing taht is due to sub-pixel movement. if that is the case, expressions will help a lot.
just option-click (mac) or ctrl-click?? (pc??) the stopwatch icon for the position property of the layer, then paste one of the expressions into the expression field.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I had the same problem I changed my output/render settings to png sequence and render no fields and brought that into avid as a autodetect sequence no fields.
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Once again, thanks for the reply.
I’m running footage on DVCPro HD codec, so it’s not “true” uncompressed HD. I’ve run this footage off of a single external SATA II drive, as well as a 5-bay RAID at apx. 125 Mb/s. I’ve run into the drive speed issues in the past, but this is definitely not the issue here. All of the footage moves perfectly except for the AE movie, and I even tried compressing it down as you suggested.
It just comes down to finding the correct values for the expression, or do what I did, which was to make the move slower. It’s a pretty crappy solution, but I’m not experienced enough to make it any better right now.
Hopefully, in the near future I’ll be able to play around with it some more and come up with a smooth moving image.
Thanks again!!!
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