Funky Flicker in DVD Menu

[Dana Salsbury]

Hey Travis,

I've had flicker on stills in my HD DVD videos. This is untested, but a friend told me to bring the still into a new project, set the field dominance to none and import it into the original project. This doesn't have anything to do with menus, but perhaps 'field dominance' is the magic word.

BTW, I cannot stand DVD Studio Pro. I need to produce Blu-Ray now anyway, so I'm going to get Roxio and try to work with their cheezy menus. I cannot find anything that suggests Apple/FCP is even working on Blu-Ray output. Rrr.

[Aric Mannion]

Originally Posted by Travis Cossel

Well, when I brought the image in to FCP it lost resolution immediately. I noticed it looked soft. Would that change by bringing it onto a 24P timeline vs. a 29.97fps timeline?

I also notice immediate loss in resolution when bringing images into FCP. It may help if your field dominance is set to none, and your canvas has to be at 100% in size for you to really judge. It still has to bring the quality down for SD in any case.
So the flicker is pulsing, not every other frame or so?
Have you tried blurring just the wall by masking out the people? And have you tried it as video instead of a PSD -the quality will be lowered in DVDSP anyway, so don't let quality loss in FCP concern you.

[Travis Cossel]

Originally Posted by Aric Mannion

I also notice immediate loss in resolution when bringing images into FCP. It may help if your field dominance is set to none, and your canvas has to be at 100% in size for you to really judge. It still has to bring the quality down for SD in any case.
So the flicker is pulsing, not every other frame or so?
Have you tried blurring just the wall by masking out the people? And have you tried it as video instead of a PSD -the quality will be lowered in DVDSP anyway, so don't let quality loss in FCP concern you.

I forgot about setting the canvas back to 100%. I'll have to try this again with the field dominance set to none and the canvas at 100%, and see how things look.

I haven't tried blurring just the wall yet because I had some flicker around the text too, which isn't set against the wall.

As for the "flicker", I wish I had a better word to describe it. Basically, you know the artifact blocks you can see when video gets compressed (like clumps of pixels)? Well, with this image there are quite a few little "clumps of pixels", or artifacts, and they change in appearance about every second. It's definitely not changing frame by frame. One second you see a certain pattern of artifacts, and the next second it shifts to a slightly different look, creating a pulsing of these artifact clumps.

[Travis Cossel]

Okay, tried bringing the image back into FCP and set the canvas to 100%. The image looked much better. Can't believe I forgot about that.

However, after exporting a 30-second Quicktime of the still and bringing it into DVDSP the image did not look sharp at all. Lots of jaggies.

I'm trying a new export via the "Quicktime Conversion" option with DV/DVCPRO compression and no field dominance.

[Travis Cossel]

No dice. The image looked the same. Lower resolution and lots of jagginess. There has to be a better way to get a nice looking still into DVDSP for use as a background image.

[Travis Cossel]

I've decided that this image is just not a good fit for DVDSP. In fact, it seems any image with lots of detail and high contrast does not compress well. I experimented with several other images and determined that high contrast alone doesn't seem to be an issue. But when you combine high contrast with an image that has lots of fine detail (like the pits in the concrete wall in the image I posted), DVDSP does a poor job of compressing it.

[Noa Put]

I use encore cs3 and noticed the same problem when I applied an effect to an image, I think I used the texturizer filter in photoshop to make the image look like it was painted on a canvas but when looked at it on a tv there was also noticeable flickering. Once I took the filter away I the problem disappeared as well.

[Travis Cossel]

Originally Posted by Noa Put

I use encore cs3 and noticed the same problem when I applied an effect to an image, I think I used the texturizer filter in photoshop to make the image look like it was painted on a canvas but when looked at it on a tv there was also noticeable flickering. Once I took the filter away I the problem disappeared as well.

Interesting. Well, that's too bad because it's a limitation on creativity, but at least now I know about the limitation.

[Aric Mannion]

Is that image 4x3? I was doing a video that was all thin red line drawings. I made a 4x3 version by mistake and it looked a lot worse. The 16x9 version wasn't so hot either though. You get a weird vibration when lines are thin -because they are between interlace lines and shifting (atleast that's what I think.)
Your text has that thin black outline, which I would definately try taking away.
But this is not what's happening to you I guess, you said it's more the compression blocks. Maybe it's the gradient that's the real problem, even HD doesn't do great with smooth gradients.

[Travis Cossel]

Originally Posted by Aric Mannion

Is that image 4x3? I was doing a video that was all thin red line drawings. I made a 4x3 version by mistake and it looked a lot worse. The 16x9 version wasn't so hot either though. You get a weird vibration when lines are thin -because they are between interlace lines and shifting (atleast that's what I think.)
Your text has that thin black outline, which I would definately try taking away.
But this is not what's happening to you I guess, you said it's more the compression blocks. Maybe it's the gradient that's the real problem, even HD doesn't do great with smooth gradients.

Yes, it was a 4:3 image. I wasn't having any trouble with the lines around the text, just mostly the concrete wall above and around the couple.