Reducing Moire in Animated Stills

I threw this together for a builder I'm working with, I hadn't shot any video in the kitchen so I just used some stills. Looking at it in full res it works fine, but after encoding and uploading it as 720P the Moire is really obvious in the stills. Is there a way to prevent this?

Video: [progressive.iplayerhd.com]

Often you can reduce this effect by slightly defocusing the image. Try a gaussian blur filter set somewhere in the range of .25 to 1.5.

Another way is to use a low pass filter in your compression software if it is offered. The only one I can think of at the moment is in Eposode. In that program there is an option in the advanced setting of the resize filter to always low pass.

It also could be an interlacing issue as you convert it to progressive. Change your sequence settings to match your output.

I also have put a 1 pixel blur on stuff too to prevent this. I see moires all of the time on broadcast spots.

Hey Chuck...I could probably tell you more after seeing all of your "encoding and uploading" settings.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Often, as you get closer to a photo more detail collides with the interlace-- or even progressive pixels. Dust spots will twinkle and the image vibrates along horizontals. You could use, as mentioned, a Gaussian Blur, and start it at .25 as the moire gets intense, ramp the Blur to 1.5. That's worked well for me.

- Loren

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I do a lot of this for clients that cannot afford to shoot...but I break stills up into layers to give them "life". My experience is: I don't do this sort of animation in FCP - always After Effects - and rendering moving pics progressively never flickers like that as long as you stay progressive through all the steps. (Interlacing is a terrible terrible disease of otherwise pretty pictures). Sometimes I add a Box Blur of .5 just to take away a hard edge but not to reduce flicker (Box Blur renders faster than Gaussian - the biggest render hog of the stock blurs). Here's an example of an "animated still" - a 2D pic that was rotoscoped into 3 layers (sky bkgd / golf course mid / balcony foreground) / spread out in Z-space / flare added adj layer added / camera push in / animated blur on balcony to simulate DOF. I compressed this same clip down to a 1280x720p H264 and it is just as clean - no flickering:





When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.