Shimmering Pictures
 

I am doing a slideshow of pictures in Premiere Pro. Some pictures have a "shimmer" (for lack of a better word) when I add motion to them. I have tried resizing these but they still "shimmer" as they increase in size. Some shimmer while others are perfectly fine. What can I do to make them all "shimmerless"?

I'm not an expert on this, but I seem to recall hearing something about this happening when your stills are much bigger than the frame size/resolution of your project. The advice I remember hearing is to not make the pics any bigger than they have to be.

In what might be related, I also recall hearing that stills work better if you run them through Photoshop first, even if all you do is re-size and save them under a new name as jpg or bmp's.

Others will know more but perhaps this is a place to start.

You need to add some blur. I typically use gaussian blur but you can use what you like best.

The problem is that the high contrast and sharp edges in your pictures are literally dancing across the scan lines. Interlaced video doesn't like it. I haven't tried stills with progressive output, but it might induce less "shimmer".

Also, you don't want to use pictures with dimensions larger than your project resolution. That will make the problem worse. If your still size is smaller than your res, the problem will be less. When scaling up to fill the screen, you are by default adding blur.

You need to limit the levels to 17-235 (rather than the computer range of 0-255) for correct display on a TV. This solves Tripp's high contrast problem.

If you have Photoshop, you can use an action to do this automatically for the whole batch of images.

Premiere prefers .tga or .png files for slideshows - if you use anything else with Encore slideshows, it converts them to .png. This causes a loss of resolution, and makes the Encore project enormous and very slow to load and run.

Thanks guys! I'll give your suggestions a whirl. I'm off to Photoshop land.........

You should try using the free utiltiy called "Irfanview" for this type of work. You can easily batch resize up to hundreds of photos into any size and format with literally a couple of clicks. And it is much faster than photoshop.

Do not use .bmp format, it is the worst for video.

As was mentioned: While resizing you should just go ahead and covert to png as well.