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Still image animation problem
I have a bit of an odd issue animating some high quality still picture in a 24p 1080 HD project in Avid.
In playback I’m having a lot of difficulty getting smooth motion in the Pan and zoom motion animation of certain stills, and this both when the effect is created using Avid’s built-in Pan & Zoom plugin as well as when rendering out from After Effects. I’m getting a sort of Jagged motion when zooming in at a moderately fast speed (not overwhelmingly fast)…
this is a subtle problem in all honesty, but because the film we are working on will comprise over 200 still photo animations of the sort, we want to pin point the issue now and not halfway through post of course. it would be very discouraging to have all this done a certain way and then find out at the end we could have done this instead, and would have fixed the issue!
I’ve consulted with my very qualified Avid Pro technician here in Montreal, and he suggests it may have something to do with the fact our film is edited in progressive, something we have not done before, and hence are not familiar yet with the limitation (traditionally our movies have been 60i), he is however convinced there has to be a workaround solution, we see these kinds of high detail fast and even much faster animation in motion picture films, perhaps not with stills but nonetheless … perhaps someone more familiar to the progressive workflow might hold some answers… I have myself worked in progressive many times, but have never had to deal with still photography in progressive.
here is a bit more details on our system and what I’ve done:
The Stills are archive footage scanned at very high resolution, most of them with a drum scanner in fact, they have been cleaned and resized to more manageable format of course, all of them are already converted to 72dpi, and are around 5000×5000, we usually resized them to fit our need as we go along (by this I mean that we determine for each one to what extent we want to zoom into and resize according to what is needed so as to not have uselessly big unnecessary files).
In After Effect they are animated in a standard way, position and scale keyframe, nothing fancy or complex, we chose to work in after effects simply to have more control on the motion and keyframe interpolation, to get more sophisticated movement, (I also simply have more knowledge working with AE as a VFX artist then in the Avid). the comps are 23.976 (like the avid project) I render in a quicktime format using a DNxHD codec for fast import.
In Media Composer (5), I import the quicktimes and include them in my edited sequence and get the jagged motion that is the problem, I am in full video quality. with no dropped frames indicated in the timeline after playback.
We are editing offline in a 3:1 transcode for the EX3 filmed footage (which looks fine btw, even the faster shots, and moderately fast pan), the Archive footage and still images are however imported in their full HD quality (DNxHD 115 for the archive footage transferred from 16mm film stock).
we are working with MC5 on an HP xw8400 workstation, 3gb of ram on XP (32-bit) and a Mojo SDI hooked up to an SD Sony trinitron monitor (hooked up via sdi output).
just to clarify, the problem is dealing with still image animation only, the CG stuff we’ve integrated so far look great, so does the footage and archive footage… which makes it all the more confusing…
thank you for any help I receive.
Pierre
VFX artist and Cinematographer
Pierre P. Blais Productions
Perception Films
https://www.vimeo.com/user1771129 -
1 Reply
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Man, I think you are just seeing 24p playback.
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