Flickering Image on DVD Output

[phillr]

I produced my Camtasia 5 project to an AVI, brought it into my DVD authoring program, made a DVD, and viewed it. It looks great for the first ~20 seconds, and then the image starts to jump/flicker every second or so.

At producing, I tried using the Indeo codec, and then the TSCC one. The problem could lie in my authoring program (Sonic myDVD), but seeing if anyone else has encountered this problem.

In Camtasia everything looks fine, my AVI files look fine. BUT.... when I was initially setting up my Powerpoint, it did alot of crazy flickering, much much more intense than the one I see on my DVD outputs. I had Camtasia open in the background and when I closed it, the flickering stopped. Some sort of connection? Anyone else encountered this? Any general DVD workflow suggestions?

[dro085]

The screen recordings will be progressive (no fields). DVD files can be encoded as either progressive or interlaced. I'm not sure if myDVD offers an option for this or not. You want progressive, not interlaced. Interlaced will make your content flicker.

Then you'll want to make sure your DVD is capable of progressive scan playback. Unless your DVD player is old, it probably supports progressive.

Then there's the TV your using to view the DVD. Older tube TVs won't do progressive, so you'd get flicker again.

The flicker comes from high contrast horizontal lines on the computer screen, which are common on the computer. Imagine a 1 pixel tall black horizontal line on a white background. Now imagine what happens if you were to hide that 1 pixel black line every other frame. That's what interlaced video is. You get the odd lines, then the even ones, then the odd ones, etc. So in one field, you'd see the black line, then in the next field it would be gone, and that's the flicker.

Knowing this, you might be able to reduce the flicker somewhat by adding a zoom keyframe at the beginning of your clips on the timeline to zoom in. CS uses a high quality scaling algorithm which will tend to average neighboring pixel colors. This has the effect of making a 1 pixel high-contrast horizontal line into a 2-3 pixel high horizontal line, which would tend to flicker less if you've got interlaced processing somewhere downstream. Zooming in will also help improve the readability of onscreen text as well.

Hope this helps.

[phillr]

Hmm.... I wish I could take a picture of my TV to show you what's happening lol. It's not the usual interlacing flickering. Like the first 20 seconds are perfect. I had some thin lines and they had that interlacing flickering. But after 20 seconds, it's more extreme flickering. It's almost as if the entire image jumps a few pixels for a single frame. I also played the DVD in windows media player with no problems.