Stuttering Stills

[Checkmate]

Hello,

I've just completed my first project and burned the DVD. I'm very happy with the results, except for one problem.

It consists of 7 scenes, each containing a number of clips. Each scene starts with a 3 second still then cross-fades into the video. Each still has a simple text title.

When played on my stand-alone DVD player, 4 of these stills look good, but 3 of them are really shaky - the kind of effect you get with a bad VCR on pause.

When played on my PC's DVD drive these stills don't shake, but they don't look good either - ghosted as if a copy of the still has been offset a few pixels.

When previewed in PE4 they look good.

The stills are .bmp and were captured using the Freeze Frame button in the monitor window, from part of the video in the scene.

Can anyone please help?

[Paul LS]

Did you deinterlace the stills when you captured them from the video. Dont recall now if someone said PE4 does that automatically.

[Checkmate]

Did you deinterlace the stills when you captured them from the video. Dont recall now if someone said PE4 does that automatically.

Thanks Paul. No, I didn't de-interlace, but I also think I read that it did it automatically. Would this cause the problem? But why on only some of the stills?

[Paul LS]

Was there any movement in the scene from which the stills that look bad were captured?

[Checkmate]

Was there any movement in the scene from which the stills that look bad were captured?

Yes, but there was movement in all 7 scenes.

[Checkmate]

Back in front of the project now, and set up an experiment where I have the work area to cover a bad still and a small part of the following video. I Export/Movie... then run the small avi in Windows Media Player - very bad shaking on the still.

Back in PE4 the still looks good in the Timeline/Monitor, but if I open it in the Clip Monitor, from the Project Window, it looks very bad, and also in my graphics editor (Paint Shop Pro X). So its down to the original frame grab.

I then used VirtualDub to find a suitable frame in the original clip, copied it to clipboard, pasted into Paint Shop Pro, and saved as a psd file. I then imported it into PE4, replaced the original bad still, and repeated the above Export/Movie. Much better in Windows Media Player, just a small amount of shaking.

Then I right-clicked the still in PE4 - Frame Hold... - and set 'Hol on In Point'. Repeating the above it was rock solid!

Confused now as to the best way of creating and configuring a frame grab

[jburrows500]

Hey John,
I'll offer this up but it might not at all be related to your issue.. I too notice when I use time stretch that in the preview screen it looks fine as well as when I burn a DVD and play it on my sony DVD player.. it all looks great. However, when I take the same DVD and play it on my cheap 49.99 Daewoo dvd player I find that the slow motion scense really stutter. I just wrote it off as a bad DVD player and figured the better dvd players must read differently or sample more.. so, maybe it might be an issue of the player playing the movie and not so much having to do with PE4... for what its worth.

JB

[Checkmate]

Thanks JB. I've had this compatibility problem before with Ulead Video Studio, which I'm moving from. I've got a cheap DVD player somewhere - I'll try it this weekend.

But I burned another DVD last night, after using the 'Frame Hold' option on the stills, and it was pretty good.

[Checkmate]

I've abandoned the 'Frame Hold' option mentioned above, in favour of 'Field Properties...Always Deinterlace'. This seems more logical, and the resulting DVD is good

[jburrows500]

Thanks.. I'll keep that in mind. Went on Amazon last night and purchased 3.0.. I have had it with 4.0.. for me, its hasnt worked despite putting more effort into getting it working than any other program I have ever had.... I'm sure Adobe and Dell appreciate it as well.

[Checkmate]

Thanks.. I'll keep that in mind. Went on Amazon last night and purchased 3.0.. I have had it with 4.0.. for me, its hasnt worked despite putting more effort into getting it working than any other program I have ever had.... I'm sure Adobe and Dell appreciate it as well.

Shame you have to go back to v3 JB. It seems crazy that some people have lots of problems, yet others are fine. The trial version failed to start a couple of times, but since installing the full version its been extremely stable for me. I'm running Pentium 4 2.8 GHz - 1.5 GB RAM - and using USB drive with 100 GB Free.

Just like to add that I'm not burning with PE4 - just creating the VIDEO_TS folder so I can verify the encoding on my PC with a DVD player. Then I Build and Burn an ISO file with ImgBurn - excellent program and free. This way I can quickly burn extra copies and control the burn speed.

[Chuck Engels]

John, If you wouldn't mind could you please post a short piece under the tools forum about imgBurn? I am sure there are other looking for a good reliable burning tool, especially a free one Any additional information you could add would be great !

[Checkmate]

Will do that Chuck