any good tricks to remove moiré patterns? i'm panning down some shots of skyscrapers in FCP which as you may be able to guess, makes a mess with all the lines.

this is a full size crop


they're not still patterns either - they're moving really fast. the moiré is not there in the high resolution original nor the scaled down PS file i'm using. the best i've come up with so far is to render the shots out, re-import them and apply the stop-motion blur filter with some special settings to merge the moiré frames together and reduce the effect. this works alright, i'm just wondered if there is a better way.

have you tried a plain ole deinterlace? If that doesn't work, then try dupeing the video on v2, changing the deinterlace to the other field, and reducing the opacity to 25-30%.

You may still have the patterns, but they won't move around on you as much.

thanks Joren!! that worked wondefully!!

it actually made the morié worse on the pre-rendered moving shot - but on the original animated stills it stopped the morié dead in its tracks. that seems odd to me because those were not DV stills - they were 1200x800 scaled down from a 4mp camera so obviously there is no interlacing in them - but i guess it gets added when they animate. the more i think about it the more sense it makes. you can still see it faintly but it's not moving at all! cheers!

Damn Joren yout a smart one. Sometimes i read your answers to posts and i just wanna kick your ass because you know more then i do.

Since this is turning into a Joren appreciation post i just wanted to throw my 2 cents in and say i agree 100%...you are extremely knowledgable and helpful. Pulled me out of a jam on multiple occassions.

thanks, guys. but not necessary.

just remember me when you're all rich and famous and you need an entourage! Ever since that new show came on HBO, I've found my new calling.

What show would that be? (Project Greenlight)?

Actually, there's a new series on HBO called "entourage" that chronicles a movies star's entourage. I want to be part of someone's entourage one day.

And, BTW Perry, I want to mention that you could probably get rid of your moire patterns completely if you pre-sized the photo in photoshop. FCP is not great for scaling and having the image alias properly. I know of a two different 3rd party plugins that use a different (better) logarithm to scale images (bicubic) that are in development now. Unfortunately neither have been released. So, if you can at all help it, pre-size the image in photoshop and keep the scale at 100%. (remember to set your helper application for PSDs so you can modify psd files in photoshop from FCP)

Even if it doesn't completely get rid of the moire, it'll probably make the image look less pixelated.