Premiere: Stills have incredible shimmer in final video

[Jolard]

I am putting together a project that mixes still images and video clips set to music. The final output will be DVD. The stills are 720 x 480, and the video is analog captured at 640 x 480.

I used the storyboard function in Premiere to put it all together, and then exported the final timeline as an avi.

The problem is that the still images have incredible shimmer. It looks just awful. I know that this is most likely an interlace issue. Thinking about it here at work (the project is at home) I can think of a few possible reasons:

- The difference in resolution of the video and the stills is causing problems

- The fact that the stills are non-interlaced, while the video clips are interlaced.

- The fact that I am using 720 x 480 instead of 720 x 530 or whatever it is.

- A setting I am inadvertantly missing in Premiere.

Anyway, my question is what is the most likely cause of the problem? Are their filters or settings in Premiere that can make the difference? I tried optimize stills, but that didn't make a difference. I also tried creating the AVI with a number of different codecs, but that didn't make a difference either.

I suspect it is the fact that I am mixing interlaced with non-interlaced. Should I de-interlace my video before adding it to the timeline? Or would this cause problems down the road.

Thanks for your help!

[Dali Lama]

Originally posted by Jolard

- A setting I am inadvertantly missing in Premiere.


I believe that there may be a setting in premiere that "reduces interlace flicker" That may help.

Try to use its help function.

Good Luck,

Dali

[Jolard]

Well I got it to work, thanks for the suggestions. Here is what happened:

I had created a storyboard in premiere, which included my stills and video clips. The default length for the stills was 5 seconds, however after rearranging all the stills and video, I realised that 5 seconds was not quite long enough and wanted to change the length to 6. I could not find a bulk way to do that, so went through 200 stills by right clicking on them, selecting speed and changing the duration.

Here was the problem. When you change the duration through the speed menu, you can set the duration, but it also changes the speed. Since I was extending the duration from 5 to 6 seconds, the speed was changing to 83%. Since they were stills, you would think this wouldn't matter.

But it did. This caused all my problems. The slowdown was enough to make the interlacing far more obvious. In all the slowed down stills, the jitter was just awful anywhere you might expect to see interlacing problems.

The key was that I was seeing the problems on the monitor and not just on the TV, so I knew it had to be something other than normal interlacign effects.

Anyway, in summary, if you are using stills in premier, feel free to change the duration, but don't change the speed in any way. If you slow down a still and it is outputting the result as an interlaced avi, then you could have big problems like I did.