Hello - My animation looks fine when I watch it on my computer, but everytime I burn it onto a DVD it has this awful strobing that occurs primarily on vertically moving horizontal lines. These lines are not perfectly horizontal, but close.
So, if I have a drawing of a box moving up and down on the screen, the right and left sides of the box will look great while the top and bottom will have this shifting, strobing thing happening.
I’ve tried a few different software systems (nero, Adobe, etc) to burn these DVDs and have cycled through just about every compression and quality setting available. Nothing seems to help.
It’s an NTSC project.
If anyone would be able to help pinpoint what I’m doing wrong I’d greatly appreciate it.
Thanks for your time.
Using V3.5 build 99 / OSX 10.4.9 / QuickTime 7.1.5 / Final Cut Express / Toast Titanium 8.
Please give a little more information what exactly you’re doing…
There’re plenty of reasons why this can happen.
How do you export out of Toon Boom Studio ?
Do you mix life-footage with your animation ?
In your editing software are there any field/interlace settings ?
(I guess for NTSC and MPEG-2 the field order should be “lower”) - have you tried that ?
Have you applied any flicker- or de/non-interlace filter ?
Have you tried another DVD player ?
Does the DVD played on your computer show the same effect ?
Do you have QuickTime ? How does your movie look there ?
What kind and brand of DVD you’re using ? Have you tried another one ?
Well, these are only a few points…
Cheers
Nolan
Hi - Thanks for your response …
To answer your questions:
I’ve been exporting as an AVI, and have used a series of different compresors, and have also tried not using a compressor at all. I have not burned a .dv export becasue none of my authoring software will support this. Would this be better quality, in general?
I do not mix any life-footage in with the animation. Everything has been created within Toonboom.
I’m not really using any editing software: I just take my AVI export directly into the authoring program. I’ve been careful to manitain “lower field” through the process. I have also tried progresive and upper field and neither of these seem to have helped.
I’ve looked, but have not found any place where an anti-flicker filter is available. The two authoring programs i’ve used are nero express and adobe encore 2.0.
I haven’t tried a diferent DVD player, but will give it a shot when I have a chance.
Playing the DVD’s on my computer actually seems to make the effect worse if anything. Again though, when I play my exports directly from my computer (without having burned them to DVD) they look very good.
Yes, when I export to quicktime or even a flash movie to be played in Q-time everything looks fine. Should i try burning a quicktime file to DVD? I was under the impression this format was structured for webcasting and so haven’t tried that. It probably goes without saying that I know very little about all this …
I’m using fairly low cost DVD’s - memorex’s. I actually did try a different (and even cheaper) brand of DVD, but for some reason these were never acknowledged by my burner (although they were -R, as supported by my drive). Do DVD brands and makes make that much of a difference?
Thank you again for your time on this. I really appreciate the guidance.
I am using a Mac, so I have very little knowledge about “Nero” and “Encore”.
Have you set your animation properties in Toon Boom Studio before you started your
project, or have you made any changes after that ?
I would suggest use the TBS preset for DV-NTSC (720x540).
Can you set any presets in your authoring software ? - than you might have to choose there (720x480) - standard NTSC digital video resolution.
The difference relates to the aspect ratio field.
(It’s just the difference between square- (computer) and non-square-pixels (TV).
If you have QuickTime Pro or any other software that can assemble image sequences,
export your movie to an image sequence -PNG or TIFF- and try that.
Otherwise export directly to a QuickTime movie and choose the compression type
Animation, Intermediate or Uncompressed (8 bit should do) if these are available to you.
When you bring one of these files into your burning software (set to best) it should take care automatically of the MPEG-2 encoding to DVD.
As far as I know DVD brands can make a huge difference in quality-output.
I personally use DVD-R 8x from Imation for years and the results are great.
Cheers
Nolan
Ok - thanks for the suggestions. I’ll do some fiddling …
Yes, I had set the animation properties prior to animating and did not change them. Once I was exporting though, i did experiment with both the frame rate (changing from 30 to 29.97) and resolution. whether I left these as they were or made changes, neither made a difference.
I’ll try some different DVD’s as well.
Thanks again.