Moho Forum

Hi, I'm trying to get the best final render possible, but I'm still ending up with jaggies.

1.I'm saving animation as a BMP sequence at NTSC resolution at 30 frames.
2. Bringing sequence into Premiere Elements 2.0 and exporting as Movie. Then choosing Microsoft DV AVI.

When I play back the rendered file on the computer (or burn it to a DVD and play it on a TV) it has jaggies. It's not terrible, but because this is a project I want to market I really want great quality.

Oddly, if I export as an MPEG (or even Microsoft AVI -without DV) the quality is better than the AVI. I find this confusing because I thought AVI was loss-less.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

Some where in your process you are resizing or doing something to the original renders that is causing the jaggies. The fact that exporting to MPEG looks better is proof of that.

There was a similar issue with project dimensions and Premiere. It turned out that the Premiere resolution was different from the render and when it was exported and out put it was scaled causing loss in quality.

You have to make sure that every step of the process does not recompress the video or rendered image sequence and also that the resolution stays the same and does not have to be scaled up.

-vern

I get a similar problem when I import into Avid. I export to a QT at the project setting of 1024x576, this looks great on the desktop. When it is imported to Avid it can have jaggy diagonal lines or flicker. The Avid setting is 16:9 widescreen, this is 1024x576 PAL. I dont understand why this happens, any ideas? My workaround is to pass the QT's through After Effects and apply a small Gaussian Blur and the Reduce Interlace Flicker effects. Export these as new QT's and re-import to Avid. This seems to work very well but I'm hoping someone will tell me why I have to do this, why can I not import directly to Avid without this problem?
Cheers
Kenny

There's a good rule of thumb -- never, never, never export to a compressed format unless it's your final pass.

Professionals always output to single images. I use BMP, but anything will work just fine. Then bring in to whatever video editor you use and things will be just fine (as long as you output at your desired resolution).

Thanks Mike, I think during my testing phase I tried every output format possible, TARGA, TIFF, QT etc. I also tried setting the Avid project settings as both Progressive and Interlaced. Nothing seems to make a difference to the jaggy diagonals or the flicker, they appear no matter what method I use. I'm assuming the problem lies with the Avid side as the files exported from Animee Pro are always great quality (QT's are using the "animation" codec and 1024x576 project setting, I have tried other CODEC's including the Avid ones, "animation" seems the best for quality and render time). I'm hoping that someone of the forum is familiar with using Avid to get their animation onto tape for broadcast delivery.
Cheers
Kenny

Is the final output from Avid jaggy and flickery? It could be the real time display changes the size or resolution of the imported video. The only way to be sure is to export to a final video at the resolution and compare that to the original.

-vern

Kenny,

When I was working with Avid it was a total hardware solution -- I am *assuming* that's not the case anymore (I've been retired from the video business for a while). If it's now software running on a PC, for example, then I assume it behaves similarly to Adobe Premiere.

In Premiere when I import a series of still frames I choose the resolution they are imported as. So there are three variables -- the res of the project, the res of the files, and the res of the import. There are defaults, of course, but if this situation were happening to me in Premiere I'd be checking one of those three things. I certainly would NOT use a Codec to construct an animation from AS to bring into Premiere (never compress anything before you bring it into your editor if at all possible).

It sounds like you're saying you've already tried importing the single image still frames as a sequence, right? And that didn't work either? Then I would check the import res in Avid. If that is okay then Vern is probably on the right track -- that you see this artifact when editing but it shouldn't show in the final output (in Premiere you would never try and judge the res from the preview).

As I said, all my Avid experience was when it was standalone hardware -- nice editing machine, but, of course, could not do all that we can do now with digital (that was tape based).

THANKS!! Because of your responses, I went back and carefully checked every step that I was doing. My problem was that I assumed that rendering with "Microsoft AVI" automatically meant the file was uncompressed (since is doesn't list a type of compression under the details of this option). I went a little deeper into the setup and found that it WAS using a compression after all. I then specifically selected "No compression" and got the great results I was looking for!

With all that being said, here is a "next step" question. When transferring the file to a DVD that will play in standard DVD players, do you recommend any specific program or setting. I'm using a very old version of MY DVD, and I noticed a little loss of quality between the rendered AVI and the burned disk. Maybe this is unavoidable because it is being compressed at this point, but I thought I'd throw it out there and ask, since you guys really know your stuff.

Thanks.

guitarzan wrote:I'm using a very old version of MY DVD, and I noticed a little loss of quality...

Can you be more specific? Standard NTC or PAL television format generally is lower quality than a computer display. Certain colors and gradated patterns will also suffer when put on to DVD. "A little loss of quality" is hard to quantify.

-vern

Plus it's hard to know how you are comparing things -- are you looking at the final DVD on your computer? The finished DVD is optimized for viewing on a television, so it's kind of like apples and oranges when trying to assess the quality versus your uncompressed AVI playing on your monitor.

I've never used MyDVD but it's also possible that it doesn't optimize the MPEG compression. Ideally you want to have as high a data rate as possible (up to about 9MBs -- after that you really won't see any improvement). Putting 90+ minutes of material on a DVD usually means a compression rate of around 4MBs. But a DVD authoring program should optimize the playback rate so it's as high (up to 9MB) as possible given the material.

What I'm getting at is that perhaps a lower end DVD program may not do this -- it might go ahead and do a lower rate regardless of the material.

not sure if you've looked into this yet, but take a look into field rendering. Often line weight, if too thin, can appear jaggy and flicker as it jumps from one field to another. pans too can give you trouble. You can soften the image yes, but the best solution is to never take line work too thin. Maybe look at some plugin solution, there are some out there.

dvd authoring is another kettle of fish altogether.
Besides the details of the video conversion which is mpeg with a whole bunch of particular settings depending on your region, there's your AC3 audio conversion which has to be very very carefully sorted to get good compression and amplitude.
You could get an app (like dvd architect) that will take care of that for you, or you could do some research.
I have the correct AC3 settings elsewhere otherwise I would post them for you..... sorry

I'm using NTSC. As I mentioned, the version of MYDVD that I'm using is pretty old (2002) and may very well be the source of my problem. It really doesn't allow for any kind of preference or quality settings. Can anyone recommend a good program that they have used for converting AVI animation files to a DVD disk that looks good on a NTSC format television? Ideally, it would be great if the program has a demo period so I can make sure I'm gettting the results I want before spending a lot of money in these tight times.

Chucky, you mentioned DVD Architect. Is this a good program with NTSC?

Knunk, thanks for your warning about line thickness. I have had that problem in the past, but now I'm pretty good about using thick lines. I appreciate you taking the time to respond though.

Yup and even blue ray.
It's Sony so only pc.
If you are mac then do a comprehensive google for pro quality consumer dvd / blue ray authoring apps.

Don't export to Microsoft DV. It's not for cartoon footage. Lagarith is the best codec for anything on the pc if you don't want to loose any quality.

Imported to AVID does have the same issues because when imported it uses it's own DV format.

A good tool for converting to DVD is TMPGEnc Plus.

I have a DVD tutorial here...
viewtopic.php?t=6900&highlight=dvd

Also, anything played on an interlaced TV will have some interlaced artifacts. It's just more noticeable on cartoons then it is on movies. Unless you put motion blur on moving objects only but this requires expensive programs, such as After Effects.