High Contrast Wiggle in Stills

[Robert@MZ3.Net]

putting together a video, it looks great on the computer but when I output to a TV it doesn't look so good. Most of the video is still pictures with transitions between them. High contrast difference areas wiggle on the edge between light and dark. One in particular still picture has a guy wearing a white shirt with (dark) trees behind him. The only part that "wiggles" is the guys shirt, the rest looks good. It's doing this at least to some degree on all the still pictures. I see a little in the moving video as well but its not as noticable.

I tried frame-based, field order a and field order b. field order b looks best for transitions, but these different modes don't have an impact on the wiggle. I also tried all these settings on the individual photos in media studios timeline, no effect on the "wiggle". I tried differnet output video resolutions and frame rates, still no beating the "wiggle".

Got any suggestions?

[Robert@MZ3.Net]

Forgot to add.... Using G400 Marvel, Windows 2000, RCA Cable to standard VCR and TV. The output looks great when viewed on the computer, the "wiggle" only shows up on the VCR and TV.

[dchip]

I had that same problem with my JPEG slide shows. I thought maybe the music I added was causing the wiggle but that was not the case. I never found what caused it but I suspect my 640x480 JPEGs just didn't have enough pixels to avoid the problem.

Anyway, if it helps you, I found that the wiggle just about disappears when I compress the final AVI into VCD compliant MPEG-1 with my trusty Panasonic encoder. The pictures are really good. Even in the high-contrast areas.

[Egbert]

I have the same problem, and i think it's the "beta" w2000 driver. With Windows 98 the (PAL) output of the Marvel is good/ no wiggle.
Egbert.

[Robert@MZ3.Net]

I found away around the problem. If I create an MPG file instead of an Matrox compress MJPEG AVI file it doesn't "wiggle" on the output.

Thanks to those that responded,
Robert@MZ3.Net

[mikiem]

For what it's worth, sounds a bit like you're encountering the limitations of TV displays: lower resolution, interlacing, different color model and so on.

If so, then compressing the files adds a bit of (unintentional?) smoothing, softening edges and perhaps blurring thin lines etc., and is actually not a bad solution if it working for you.

My only hint would be to enable dual head display or similar to get a look at your stills while in P/Shop or whatever editing software you use. Spotting problem patterns or colors at that stage, a bit of editing &/or filtering might save you problems down the road, finding problems after you've rendered files etc...

luck
mikie

[fluggo99]

Mikiem has the right idea, but let me explain it further.

Did everyone forget that television is interlaced? Your pictures "wiggle" cause they're drawn in pieces-- on one field, an area is dark, and on the other field, that same area is light. Draw light & dark back and forth at 60 Hz and things begin to flicker and wiggle.

Solution: A de-interlace option in your editor, applied to the photos in question, should fix it. (MSP has a "flicker reduction" option, but I've no idea what it really does. Try it.) Another option is to render to a non-interlaced resolution (352x240 for Matrox MJPEG).