The Shimmers, Flickers and Sparkles
by Aaron Needle
on
Nov 6, 2009 at 9:08:58 pm
When I am creating photo montages in Vegas Platinum Pro 9, I find that many of the photos with high contrast or lower lighting often seem to unintentionally shimmer, flicker and sparkle.
I have tried to modify the photos by reducing contrast, removing digital noise, and soften the colors. However, I have not yet found anything that works. It does not seem as bad when viewing on a SD TV. However, one of my customers had a 60" HDTV and it looked seriously distracting.
Re: The Shimmers, Flickers and Sparkles by Mike Kujbida on Nov 7, 2009 at 2:31:04 pm
Add the Gaussian blur in the vertical direction only, around 0.001 to 0.003.
If the images are too large in size (i.e. pixels), reduce their size helps a lot.
Are you doing any panning and/or zooming on the images?
If not, reduce them to your project size (720 x 480 for NTSC DV).
Here's another suggestion I grabbed a long time ago.
In an overexposed or underexposed image, you want to affect all the pixels in the image equally.
Follow these steps to fix an overexposed image.
1. Duplicate the background layer into a new layer.
2. Put the new layer in Multiply mode.
This will intensify the saturation of the image.
Not enough? Duplicate the multiplied layer again, until you get the results you want.
Underexposed images are handled the same way except you put the new layer in Screen mode instead of Multiply.
Re: The Shimmers, Flickers and Sparkles by Diego Solis on Nov 7, 2009 at 9:53:07 pm
Here' what I have done in the past:
- Use the filters/video/NTSC colors option in Photoshop (if you have it) when photo editing is done, that should fix the difficult colors such as red..
- Adjust your image to 1x the video size if you are not going to zoom it. If you are, then use 2x at the most.
- Using the Sony Vegas Gaussian Blur Filter at 0.001, vertical only could help although it softens the image a bit.
- I recently started using the Sony Vegas Soft Contrast filter, moderate setting with great results.
- Using the right encoder helps, I find that MainConcept & Sony MP4 are more contrasty and accentuate the flickering, WMV renders softer video and XVid (AVI) is the best for reducing contrast problems.
