Bad image in the camera movements

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negroclarito
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Bad image in the camera movements

Post by negroclarito »

How I can do to make the camera work did not skip? The image is not smooth

It is problem of my computer or AS? Anyone know how to improve this?

Already tried in different ways and always looks bad.

This is an example of what happens ....

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=08ZL6JWS



Thanks
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Peteroid
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Post by Peteroid »

I'm really very much a novice, so I might not be giving good advice here... but I'll try anyway...hehe

Although it will be somewhat tedious and time consuming, you could establish a keyframe for every frame for the camera motion, and then any frame that looks bad manually adjust the parameters.

You might get away with just looking for bad frames and then put keyframes just there and tweak.

Although AS7PRO should do smooth animation this way. Maybe you should describe what exactly you are doing to move the camera (i.e., do you only use a start and end keyframe, or are there more in between for camera movement)?

Did you set up these keyframes 'roughly' by just moving the camera manually by hand, or did you make the camera motion precise by entering numerical values in the (x,y,z) fields for the camera position at all of its keyframes? If you did this 'by hand' even a small variance from perfection is going to, on an occasional frame, have to make up any cumulative error and do a single frame 'jump' that is more than expected, which upon inspection of your sample video, looks like what is happening... (btw, it doesn't look that bad, but like you, I'm a stickler for perfection)...

I'm working on something that might help, a 'point the camera' script... but it might be a few days before I have it done (or longer, I'm just studying LUA now)...
[==Peter==]
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negroclarito
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Post by negroclarito »

Thanks for the reply.

Already tried in every way. I tried it frame by frame and goes very slowly. If I move several times in each frame so that it moves faster it is the same
I guess I have to leave as is
Thanks

Greetings
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Peteroid
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Post by Peteroid »

negroclarito wrote:Thanks for the reply.

Already tried in every way. I tried it frame by frame and goes very slowly. If I move several times in each frame so that it moves faster it is the same
I guess I have to leave as is
Thanks

Greetings
OK. I have one more possible way to make it smoother. I think it even has a pretty good chance of working. The conditions might make it impractical or unfeasible in your situation, but it only requires VERY small un-noticeable tweaks that could make a big difference in animation. And this is untested by me, so it might not even work (something else could be the cause, like compression). But enough of disclaimers...

What I have to think is happening is rounding off errors. This accumulate, and eventually it takes bigger or smaller movement forward than the rest, and you get a slight jerk visually.

Sooo... IF this is the culprit, then if there were NO accumulated error due to round off, then it would not occur.

Therefore, it might be smother by doing this. Make it so the number of frames of motion divides 'evenly' into the distance it moves, and by 'evenly' I mean:

distance / frame_count = N x .1 for some integer N


OR

distance / frame_count = N x .01 for some integer N


OR

distance / frame_count = N x .001 for some integer N


That is, the amount it has to move is a 'nice' fraction of distance per frame.

For example, frame_count multiples of 2 and 5 are great... multiples of 3 can be evil (since they result in decimal representations that go on for infinite length, and thus MUST be APPROXIMATED at some point). But the frame_count be a multiple of 3 if the distance is divisible by .003... so the only thing that is important is the RATIO of (distance/frame_count).

Whenever I enter any numeric coordinate data into AS7PRO it always rounds it to the nearest 4 decimal places (nearest 1/10000).... and rounds. Thus, I assume anything that is EXACT and a multiple .001 (i.e., 3 digits of decimal accuracy) will be handled perfectly.

So, do this. Change the distance or number of frames in the action until

distance / frame_count = N x .001 for some integer N


or it comes as an EXACT number with NO MORE than 3 digit of accuracy. If you use a calculator it should show no more than 3 digits past the decimal point when calculating the above ratio.

THEN it just might work perfectly! :)
[==Peter==]
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negroclarito
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Post by negroclarito »

BUF!!!
I did not understand much .... my English is poor, sorry ... I can understand thanks to google translate, but sometimes they do well.

I can explain a little slower .... (Like I was stupid) I did not understand some things ... jajaja

I use AS6. What I say can be done in AS6?
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Peteroid
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Post by Peteroid »

negroclarito wrote:BUF!!!
I did not understand much .... my English is poor, sorry ... I can understand thanks to google translate, but sometimes they do well.

I can explain a little slower .... (Like I was stupid) I did not understand some things ... jajaja

I use AS6. What I say can be done in AS6?
OK. Let me try explain in a simpler way! :)

To move smoothly from one point to another you should move the same distance per frame. If you don't, then frames that move more or less distance for a frame will seem wrong, and you get an animation that is not smooth.

The way in between frame generation (tweening) is done, it takes the distance the layer moves, divides it by the number of frames, and then attempts to move it by the amount each frame.

But, if the frame number does not divide evenly into the distance, it can not move the same distance each frame since there is a remainder to the divide. Thus, every so often it will have to make up for the inaccuracy by moving a little less of more than other frames, and this looks like what you are seeing in your animation.

Now, AS is perfectly accurate up to 3-4 decimal places. That is, it can handle 1.234 perfectly, but might approximate 1.23456 to 1.2347. So, if you make sure that:

distance_layer_moves / frame_count = amount AS wants to move layer each frame

is PRECISELY a number which can be perfectly represented in a number that has at most 3 decimal places of accuracy, then it can move this EXACT SAME distance each frame to accomplish the animation, and do so without any need to make up for inadequacies. That is, it will move as close to perfectly smooth as possible.

You don't need to understand the above to accomplish this. Just do this:

- find the distance your animation moves the object/layer (distance).
- find the number of frames in the animation (frame_count).
- compute distance/frame_count on a calculator.
- does answer have more than three digits past the decimal point (i.e, 1.234 is good, 1.2345 is bad)? If not, then you are done! [exit]
- If not... keep the distance the same but make it take 1 more extra frame to do the animation.
-Then go to the top of this list, and repeat till the above 'done' condition is true. You may have to do this for a number of passes before you get to the 'done' condition.

Hope that helps. I'm trying to use words that translate better into other languages... not sure if I accomplished that... :)
[==Peter==]
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negroclarito
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Post by negroclarito »

Sorry, and thank you very much for trying to explain, but I still do not understand what you want me to say.


The movement that I do not with objects. Only move the camera.

It may be that the background image is too heavy, I do not know

Thanks a lot for trying to help
:)
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Peteroid
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Post by Peteroid »

negroclarito wrote:Sorry, and thank you very much for trying to explain, but I still do not understand what you want me to say.


The movement that I do not with objects. Only move the camera.

It may be that the background image is too heavy, I do not know

Thanks a lot for trying to help
:)
I have a better idea.

Give me this information:

How much distance does your camera move (in world units)?
How many frames does the animation take?

I might be able to just give you easy instructions if you give me those two numbers.

PS- I didn't know you did this by moving the camera. The principle will still work with a camera instead of moving the layer!
[==Peter==]
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neeters_guy
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Post by neeters_guy »

negroclarito wrote:It may be that the background image is too heavy, I do not know
:)
Quite possible. A strobing background is caused by a fast horizontal pan with many vertical lines (ie., very detailed banana stalks). It's also possible that the compression codec is causing artifacts due to excessive motion data.

Possible solutions would be 1) pan slower or 2) reduce the vertical lines (ie., spaced farther apart).
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slowtiger
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Post by slowtiger »

The solution might be much simpler.

When I opened the file in Quicktime, it says it were 25 fps and 10 sec long.

When I imported the file into AS to check the odd movement, I noticed it was only 240 frames long.

So my guess is that you have a project setting (24 fps) different from the export setting (25 fps).

Please check and try to export at teh exact same fps rate as in the project settings, and tell us if the movement gets better.
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Post by Peteroid »

slowtiger wrote:The solution might be much simpler.

When I opened the file in Quicktime, it says it were 25 fps and 10 sec long.

When I imported the file into AS to check the odd movement, I noticed it was only 240 frames long.

So my guess is that you have a project setting (24 fps) different from the export setting (25 fps).

Please check and try to export at teh exact same fps rate as in the project settings, and tell us if the movement gets better.
Nice catch! :)

Yeah... THAT is more than likely what is wrong... I didn't look for that info...
[==Peter==]
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negroclarito
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Post by negroclarito »

Thank you all for the answers ...

Normally in Europe using the PAL system, which runs at 25 frames (do not know why we do not and identical systems.) I have to put it at 25 because then when editing the video I can not change.
To test, I made a video at 24 frames, but the result is the same.

I updated quicktime codecs, but still the same.

I tried several formats for the background image .... JPG, PNG ... and it did not work
The vertical lines to change .... buf!, it gave me a lot of work to the background of the jungle .... I think I'm not going to change... :D

I also tried all types of frame .... smooth, linear .... and nothing

I've had this problem before, but I'm getting better as I like to go do things better.
If you find a solution tell me .... I think I will not stop it anymore or I'll go crazy, hahaha
What I do is a slower movement (as said neeters_guy), and so will be felt less. I think it's a problem with AS.




Thanks a lot :wink:
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Post by slowtiger »

OK, I did a bit more investigation on this.

I reconstructed the panning image from screenshots from the original movie. I imported this image into a project of exact the same dimensions and made the pan the very same length as the original (#1 - 230), using linear interpolation for that.

Then I exported several versions using different codecs. Surprise: the playback was as choppy as in the original movie.

I opened the information panel during Quicktime playback, it gives the actual playback frame rate: and this was fluctuating between 23.66 and 25.3 or something. It was not constant!

Now I have an old PPC G5 machine which only plays small video files fluently. So I exported again in half dimensions: and that looked much better in the playback!

My conclusion: There's nothing wrong with AS. But a big video file may choke on a machine with a not so strong graphic card. The problem should not occur after transfer to video tape, or on a really fast computer.

If you can, try the very same movie file on a computer which is able to playback HD in real time. It should play fine, since there's nothing wrong with the images, and the increments of the pan are correctly calculated.
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negroclarito
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Post by negroclarito »

Yes, sure to be the computer or video player. I tried GOM player and it looks like a little better ... even colors are also better.

I have to live with it, hahaha

Thanks
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