seeking straight(er) edges with rotated elements

DougS

Newbie Joined: Feb 19, 2013 09:09 Messages: 3 Offline

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Apr 01, 2019 13:31

In my current project I'm rotating colorboards and images to a fixed position. What is displayed within PowerDirector and produced video are these objects having stepped edges. For photos, I'm using Power Tools / Photo Rotation, and for the colorboards am using Keyframe / Clip Attributes / Rotation. How can these objects be modified within PD so that these jagged edges are not so prevalent?


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This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Apr 01. 2019 13:36

optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Apr 01, 2019 15:21

Quote In my current project I'm rotating colorboards and images to a fixed position. What is displayed within PowerDirector and produced video are these objects having stepped edges. For photos, I'm using Power Tools / Photo Rotation, and for the colorboards am using Keyframe / Clip Attributes / Rotation. How can these objects be modified within PD so that these jagged edges are not so prevalent?

Those look to be caused by a lower resolution preview setting and shouldn't appear in your finished video. Click on the camera icon to take a full resolution screenshot then attach it here. They should be much less jagged than what your editor-view screenshot shows.

They also look to by highly zoomed in. Is that the case?

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at Apr 01. 2019 15:24

DougS

Newbie Joined: Feb 19, 2013 09:09 Messages: 3 Offline

Apr 02, 2019 00:51

Quote

Those look to be caused by a lower resolution preview setting and shouldn't appear in your finished video. Click on the camera icon to take a full resolution screenshot then attach it here. They should be much less jagged than what your editor-view screenshot shows.

They also look to by highly zoomed in. Is that the case?

Yes, the screenshot was taken at 300% size from within the preview screen to emphasize the issue of stepped edges on rotated elements.

1. The included images are directly imported from an iPhone and have resolution of 4032x3024, 72dpi.
2. The resulting video was output as Standard 2D / H.264 AVC / MP4 / MPEG-4 640x480/30p (6Mbps)

With these resolutions the resulting video clearly displays significant stepped edges on a 32" monitor. Increasing video output to MPEG-4 1280x720/120p (40Mbps) resulted in negligible improvement.

Attached are stripped down versions of the project. "test.pds" contains placement of both colorboards and images. "test_1.pds" contains only the colorboards.

Filename	test_1.pds	Download
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Filename	test.pds	Download
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optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Apr 02, 2019 01:58

Quote
Yes, the screenshot was taken at 300% size from within the preview screen to emphasize the issue of stepped edges on rotated elements.

1. The included images are directly imported from an iPhone and have resolution of 4032x3024, 72dpi.
2. The resulting video was output as Standard 2D / H.264 AVC / MP4 / MPEG-4 640x480/30p (6Mbps)

With these resolutions the resulting video clearly displays significant stepped edges on a 32" monitor. Increasing video output to MPEG-4 1280x720/120p (40Mbps) resulted in negligible improvement.

Attached are stripped down versions of the project. "test.pds" contains placement of both colorboards and images. "test_1.pds" contains only the colorboards.

A couple of things. You can't share a PDS project directly, because it doesn't contain any of the source clips. You have to use File > Pack Project Materials... and then direct PD to a cloud folder to store the project and related files, then paste the link to that here.

The main item though is the resolution you've tried producing to. Honestly, 640 x 480 is a poor choice for any high quality current work, and it's really only suitable for old style analog TV recordings. Even 1280x720 is still fairly low quality for 4k x 3k photos, but the jagged edges should be less noticeable. You'd really want to produce to HD at the least, or ideally to MPEG-4k 4096 or 3840 x 2160/30p (50 Mbps) to have the smoothest edges and to really show off your photo quality.

One thing to note is that since there are a fixed number of pixels in each direction, there will necessarily be visible steps when any straight line is at an angle, and the steps will become more obvious whenever you zoom in. They key is to produce to a high pixel size format.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Apr 02. 2019 02:02