Moire in Still Images

[Chuck Spaulding]

Not sure where to post this, but I'm currently shooting a video of a house remodel and edited together a little video for the builder. The only actual video is of the Christmas Tree, I haven't started shooting video of the kitchen yet so I used some still that I had shot. When played in full resolution it looks great, but when encoded and played online there's a lot of Moire in the stills. Is there an easy way to reduce this?

http://progressive.iplayerhd.com/data/f/78f6738f.m4v

[Chuck Spaulding]

I would have thought with more than 130 views someone would have had a suggestion on how to improve this.

Is the link or video not playing?

[Warren Kawamoto]

Maybe people are not responding because the link requires us to download the video in order to view it? For me I think it took around 20 minutes!

I did see the nasty moire only over the photos. As you said, it looked good in HD...I suspect the problem lies in your web encoding, but we don't know what you encoded it with, what settings you used, etc. Off the bat, I would say try resizing your photos until it's close to 1920x1080 or whatever your project pixel size is? If your original photos are 5000x3000 pixels, I'm guessing that the problem happens when the photo is being re-scaled.

[Chuck Spaulding]

Sorry about the long download.

I encode with compressor using the iPad setting, which is what this is, however I usually then upload that which get's encoded by either YouTube or Vimeo which optimizes for streaming. But in this case the moire was so bad that I didn't use Vimeo or Youtube.

[Warren Kawamoto]

I looked at your video again. Since the moire happens only on your still photos and not on the video portion, I think the problem is how you're processing your photos. As mentioned in my earlier post, try resizing it to a lower resolution in photoshop before importing it into your ipad, and let us know if that makes a difference.

[Chuck Spaulding]

I take the full resolution stills into AE and pan and scan them on a 1080P timeline. I would have thought someone would have made a clever filter for this anyone who uses stills would have this problem.

For this reason I don't usually use stills in my videos but I'd sure like to be able to in a way that the viewer couldn't tell it was a still.

[Duane Adam]

I haven't replied to your post because I didn't have an answer for you Chuck and have had that problem through the years. Just finished a project though were there wasn't much aliasing in the stills. The only difference was everything was shot in raw and resized to either 2400 or 3600 jpegs. Don't know why they look cleaner but they do. Video here: 18157 Wagner Road-Official Site

[Chuck Spaulding]

Thanks Duane, I've been experimenting with the Median and unsharp mask filters in AE and with the right settings appears to do a good job of eliminating the moire while still keeping the detail.

I loved the timelapse in your video. Are you a Realtor that shoots your own property videos?

[Duane Adam]

Originally Posted by Chuck Spaulding

I loved the timelapse in your video. Are you a Realtor that shoots your own property videos?

Yeah created a little niche that the competition hasn't been able to match (yet). Brings in some pretty cool properties.

I'm not sure my previous post was 100% accurate as I see moire and aliasing on a larger screen. Let us know if you solve this Chuck.

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Chuck,

I've been doing pan and scan of high-res stills in Premiere for years and whenever I get details that are flickering during movement, the very simple fix is to open the still in Photoshop and apply Gaussian Blur - just .1 or .2 is usually sufficient - and that totally fixes the output. And the amount of softness added is so tiny no one will every notice, but it can remove the flickers for a 100% improvement in the end result.

Note - after applying blur, do a SAVE AS, so as not to change the original image permanently!

Regards,