photos perfect for montages
 

Hi all. I'm doing photo montages using FCP, and cleaning the images in Photoshop. Sometimes, no matter what I do in Photoshop (and I'm pretty good at Photoshop, BTW), pictures look really bad with motion. Jaggies, specially in motion shots. It looks good in the viewer, but when I export it it looks awful! I'm using Compressor to export in Mpeg2 (m2v) with the "60 minute high quality widescreen" setting.

Any advice? Tips? Best Practices?

Thanks much!

A.J.,

Welcome to the board.

I get my worst results in adding motion to images when there are horizontal lines like window shades, etc. To knock it down, though, I take out the blur brush in photoshop and put it on maybe 15% and blur those areas out a bit. When you look at the still you don't like it so much, but when you are moving it in video you really can't tell that it's blurred.

Horizontal lines are the worst, but I do it for others too. Play around with it and see if it helps. Good luck.

I would also try using a guassian blur filter @ about .1 intensity, and/or a de-interlace filter. That usually helps me in these situations.

But the blur in photoshop might be your best bet.

hope that helps

I always add FCP's Gaussian Blur filter with a radius of 0.25 to highish resolution (around 2K x 1.5K pixels) stills on the timeline. This deals well with suppressing the line twitter in moving/zooming/rotating stills.

thanks for the tips guys! the horizontal lines are really what's been at the root of the problem... i think i have a handle on it now, thanks to y'all.