Moray Effect on still images with motion effect

Hello All,

This is such a basic question, I'm embarrassed to ask BUT...

I have an SD project which incorporates alot of tiffs that have pans or zoom ins. They look fine on my computer monitor when the canvas is at %100 but look terrible on SD TV monitor. Basically some of the images have a terrible moray effect. Where do I begin to trouble shoot this? Are there certain specs that are necessary for the image to be? dpi, size, pixel aspect ratio??? The tiffs are generally larger than 730x480 b/c of the zooms. Is there a render setting? help.

yes, there is a render setting,
but it might not be the only thing you need to do:

in your sequence settings go to "Video Processing",
and set Motion Scaling to BEST

filters can help too:

start with the "Flicker" filter, set to Max.
(Effects > Video Filters > Video > Flicker Filter)
don't worry, it's a filter that deals with flicker, not adds it!

if that doesn't do the trick, a slight gaussian blur filter (start with 0.3 or 0.5) can help with this.


nick

You can also alleviate some of this by adding grain, but I don't know how well Final Cut's grain tools stack up. I've always used After Effects (occasionally) or Shake (usually) for this.

I'd posted this earlier - but here's what works for us agan:

A few things might help

1 - you don't say how many megs big the pictures are -- get that down as small as you can -- pixel size - generally twice as big as your project so you have lots of headroom to pan and zoom there are a lot of great already calculated sizes for picture size in pixels for the type of project you are working on search the forums for the proper blow up sizes to give you enough headroom for zooming in on an image. Don't have them in front of me but a simple Google search will reveal them. The less overhead on FCP and often a smoother move.

2 - Jittery-ness and moray effect - can come from many things -- fine lines or reflective objects in picture getting caught between scan lines (a slight Gaussian blur on the troublesome parts of the photo in photoshop can help eliminate that)

3 - this is an odd one but I've found it works -- check in your motion tab the beginning and ending scale sizes as well as center and rotation numbers -- and make them all even numbers (no 208.5 or 209.3 -- make them 208 or 210) For some reason (and it may have to do with the getting caught between scan lines issues) the even numbers will eliminate a jittery move. This reason may be entirely wrong - but it's fixed a number of troublesome picture moves for us

Re-sizing the images before-hand to make them "just" big enough for the level of zoom you're going for really helps. FCP doesn't cope well scaling down very large images to SD rez. If that's still a problem, pre-blurring the images really helps. Again, just enough to remove the problem in the end results.

Remembering the SD video is interlaced, putting a flicker-filter on the end to get rid of the interlace interline twitter is also a good idea.

Graeme