Video: Frame Rate and a Fix for the Ghosting Effect

In both Man Drawing a Reclining Woman and the Sword of Damocles I have what looks like ghosting in the animation. My process is to shoot 12 photos for each second of animation then stretch that sequence in Sony Vegas to 24fps. Vegas then blurs every other frame. When analyzing the footage within Vegas frame by frame I would see one clean frame followed by blended frame composed of the the previous frame and the next frame.

What I found out a few months ago is a setting in Sony Vegas called “disable resample” which eliminates the blending and will render each frame cleanly. The result is that every frame is shown twice with no blending. The default in Vegas is set to resample which blends every other frame automatically for image sequence clips. I still haven’t found a way to disable it permanently but in the meantime I am re-mastering my films to remove the ghosting. Jason, on a thread for a related topic at the stopmotionanimation.com forum, mentions the same fix in Adobe Premier by unchecking “blend speed changes”.

Here is my breakdown of the process:

  • Shoot 12 photos for each second of animation with my DSLR camera (the spy cam is the same)
  • Import the frames into Vegas as a numbered image sequence
  • For each sequence/clip I set the frame rate to 24fps and a field order of None (progressive)
  • Drag the sequence to the timeline
  • For each clip or sequence on the editing timeline I:
    Right Click > Choose Switches > Choose Disable Resample

3 responses to “Video: Frame Rate and a Fix for the Ghosting Effect”

  1. Grant I always wondered about the ghosting, I kind of liked it. added a certain something. It will be interesting to see without and see if it “feels” the same.

    Even if you take it out it’s kind of like a cheap motion blur, might be a good technique in some cases to use.

  2. yeah…I always wondered about that too..

    it definately could have its uses….very interesting find…..and thanks for the process….I use premiere and after effects to assemble my frames.

    justin

  3. Yep, thanks for the heads up G….I still havent rerendered any of my clips to see how it works, but I have the same ghosting problem with Vegas…..

    You da man!