FCP 6 stills shake when zoom/pan

Have you tried rendering the stills?

tim

You need to run deinterlace filters on the stills. This can be done in FCP or Photoshop. The shaking is your monitor getting confused between the odd/even fields.

I have to disagree. There is no benefit by de-interlacing. Applying a De-interlace filter to a still will not have any effect on the image, because the source isn't interlaced to begin with. Still images are progressive by nature, and even though applying motion to them in an interlaced sequence creates interlaced video, Final Cut progressively-scans the images to the interlaced frame rate. Like how shooting in 30p on a DV camera is actually recording 30 progressively-scanned frames at 60i with both fields containing the same image.

tim

How are you monitoring the video? External video monitor or the Canvas?

Don't judge by what you see in the Canvas. If that's your only option, you might improve your odds a bit by setting the Canvas on 100%. Even so, don't make a final judgment based on what you see in th Canvas.

The best way I have found to get crisp, clean zooms and pans in FCP, is to change the field dominance to "none" in your sequence settings. This may screw up the other video in your sequence however. If that is the case, take the stills that you want to animate, nest them in another sequence with the dominance again set to "none" and then bring that nested sequence back into your main timeline. It should work just fine for you. I have also noticed, so far, that it doesn't really matter the size of the image if you do it this way. Have fun

Use the 'Flicker Filter' from Effects=>Video Filters=>Video
Then set to the degree you wish to remove the flicker.

Listen to Tim.

Here's the larger explanation.

The flickering you see is an artifact of the interlaced nature of video. It is a result of either very thin (often horizontal) elements that exist on one scanline as is common in text/ titling or scanned images with a great deal of detail in high contrast. (Note: It does no good to import images hugely larger than the necessary pixel dimensions of the video sequence. All it does is force FCP to work harder at interpolation.)

As the alternate fields play, the offending element is essentially being turned on/off creating the impression of a flicker. The basic strategy is to get the element to exist over two scanlines so it is refreshed every time the field plays and/or to reduce the amount of contrast so the difference between ON and OFF is not noticeable.

Things to try (In increasing order of image degradation)

• (in FCP) field order>none
• (in FCP or Photoshop) reduce whites by 10% - reduces overly bright areas
• (in FCP) flicker filter - minimum
• (in Photoshop) motion blur>vertical> .2 - .5 pixels - blurs vertically only
• (In FCP or Photoshop) Gaussian blur> .2 - .5 pixels -blurs both horizontally as well as vertically
• (in FCP or Photoshop) deinterlace - throws away half the image and is generally not appropriate on scanned or still images.

One neat trick is to use the selection tool to limit area you apply the vertical and/or gaussian blur to only the troublesome part rather than indiscriminately soften the entire thing.

Remember: Unless you are viewing your work in the appropriate external NTSC/PAL monitor, you are playing blind. The computer monitor only shows you a proxy image.

good luck.
x

An excellent explanation, X. There are a lot of possible solutions here for the OP to try that should solve his problem.

(Note: It does no good to import images hugely larger than the necessary pixel dimensions of the video sequence. All it does is force FCP to work harder at interpolation.)

I find that I get the best results by re-sizing the images in Photoshop to sizes a little larger than the largest sizes I expect to use in Final Cut.

tim

And one lesson I learned the extremely hard way is NEVER create exorbitant files, I mean like 4K and above for scanned images. When the files size for the pics is in the many hundreds or in my case, even in the GB range, FCP will crash everytime and Photoshop will slow to a crawl. I'm not saying you have huge files, but once I converted my 1.2GB image to a 5MB JPEG, all was happy again.

Good Luck,
-Brian

P.S. I've also had the "shakes" and "stutters" with images, but on an NTSC monitor, like once I burned it to DVD, they looked PERFECTLY clear and crisp.

I see this thread is a little old but it is more or less addressing my problem so I hope someone is still listening in.

I too am having shaking issues with a video that seems to be somewhat different that those described here. Mine too has to do with some motion applied to jpegs within a video timeline. However this one in particular is odd in that for the better part of its six seconds on screen it is smooth as silk but when the playhead gets about two thirds of the way through the image jiggles as though it were being shot with a notion camera on a copy stand and someone bumped the table in the middle of the shot. There are several other Photoshop generated jpegs in this video that have similar moves and are not at all shaky.

Why would this happen to this one clip?

Alan I assume you've rendered them in the timeline. I have also had this issue what fixed it for me is the render files somehow got corrupted, try deleteing the render files see if that helps.
I have also had a fair amount of luck with shaky stills by going into the viewer/motion/crop menu of the still clip and used edge feathering try starting at 2 or 5

Shaun--

Thanks for the reply. Coupla thoughts:

--As for rendering, yes it is rendered in the timeline, but what I guess I didn't mention is that the problem clip looks fine when viewed from the timeline on the NTSC monitor. It's only after I export to a QT movie that just this one jitters towards the end of its move (which, by the way, is a simple short zoom into a logo). Could this be corrupted render files? I wouldn't think so.

--I've seen this edge feathering mentioned elsewhere, but isn't that only useful when there's just an overall "pulsing" of sorts due to hard edged graphics unable to reconcile with video lines? As I mentioned, all the other motion graphics in this piece are fine, it's just this one that really looks like it's being shaken physically momentarily.

ab

I may have the same problem, as the sequence plays perfect from fcp. I thought It could be in the conversion to m2v files. I tryed filters and the like. All to no avail. I altered the GOP sequence and introduced compression markers to force i frames in the troubled areas. even using the H264 converter, the shake is lessened, but still unacceptable. Five days later and I still can't make it work.







I am relatively new to all of this, and would like very much to hear of any other suggestions, as I must make this work.

Unless you are using an external PAL (or NTSC) monitor, you have no idea how the sequence plays in FCP. FCP only shows one frame of interlaced video by default.

Get yourself an external monitor and go through the steps I outlined above.

Good luck.

x

Your post of March 28th. was one of the first attempts of trying to stop the flicker, if I remember correctly it appeared like I was tracking a still image that was taken on too slow a shutter speed,with camera movement.



I agree with the external monitor, but have to work within my limitations.



My first attempt to sort this problem was the image stabilizer, by the time I got here, I had already tried most suggestions, not only from this site. As your post was a combination, I thought their might be other suggestions.



I should add that I usually try the same method three times, incase I miss something, your method I only tried twice. I will make one last attempt at it.



I have now re-cut the sequence to exclude most of the stills. I will try the ones that have to stay, and if it doesn't work then I will print out the image A2 or A1 and track it with the camera.



Thank you for taking the time to respond.



John