Video is Flickering on Burned DVD

[Peter_B]

Hi all!
So, I'm working on an hour long documentary at the moment and I've been running into some trouble. The editing work is basically finished, and so I wanted to burn it to a DVD so I can watch it on a TV (and show some other people and get feedback, etc...)

I'm using Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum with video footage shot on a Panasonic AG-HMC40P. When I click Make Movie, in Vegas I select DVD, and go through the wizard. It then renders the video to MPEG and the audio to AC3. After that I sent it to DVD Architect, burn a simple DVD (one menu, nothing special) and try and watch it.

The DVD starts to play back fine, but at about 22 minutes in it starts flickering. It's a little difficult to explain, but the video footage flickers. Almost as if every second frame was replaced with a still image from the video clip. Now the weird part about this is that it only happens with one interview. This documentary consists of many interviews, all in different video clips/files. But this is only happening in one, which is one file. What's worse is that this one interview is about 25 minutes long, and spread out throughout the entire documentary. (It's kinda the basis of the documentary). Also it's not the entire interview that flickers, only about 2 thirds of it.

Has anyone ever heard of something like this happening before? I'm sort of at a loss right now. I'm on a deadline and I'm getting worried. If it's any help, the file that seems to be the culprit is a .MTS that I'm editing directly in Vegas.

Can anyone give me any suggestions?

Cheers!

[poisondeathray]

What mode did you shoot in? eg. 1920x108060i ? or something else?

Did you shoot that particular flickering interview footage differently than the other sections?

Did you examine the source footage from the "flickering interview"? ie. was flickering present in the source (could you have accidentally hit a button during recording)? - To put it another way - is the flickering present in vegas before rendering to MPEG2 ?

What settings did you use for DVD Architect (i.e what kind of dvd? 480i60? )

Did you do any time changes during your edits (like speed up/ slow down footage)?

[Peter_B]

I wasn't there when the footage was shot. (I'm just the editor). But from the looks of it, whoever shot this footage was just using the default setting. The other guy who is working on the project had created a new project in Vegas, imported the 25 minute interview and just went ahead and encoded and burned it to a DVD. The flickering wasn't there. So that seems to imply that it's not the file, but something else.

As for settings for DVD Architect, I just did the default settings. I honestly have no experience with DVD burning so I don't know if that is the problem. And I didn't do anything special to the clip (no effects, etc...).

[poisondeathray]

The details are important. You need to see if the footage is different e.g. 60i vs. 30p etc...

The other guy who is working on the project had created a new project in Vegas, imported the 25 minute interview and just went ahead and encoded and burned it to a DVD. The flickering wasn't there. So that seems to imply that it's not the file, but something else

Not necessarily.

e.g. If the flickering footage was different characteristic than the other footage (e.g. it might be 30p, and the other was 60i), then by default vegas will create new blended frames to make up the temporal resolution in a 60i project. If you disabled resample, it would frame double. If the other guy set the project settings so it matched the 25min interview, it would look fine. But if you had a mixed footage composition, this could explain what you are seeing.

I don't even have a good idea of what you mean by flickering. It means different things to different people. Do you mean interlace flicker, or do you mean choppy playback, or ghosting, or temporal luminance changes?

Almost as if every second frame was replaced with a still image from the video clip

This strongly implies resampling, or frame doubling, which looks different than interlace flicker.

When you play the elementary video stream on the PC, before authoring, before burning, does it flicker?

I cannot provide any more suggestions until you provide some sample footage or describe more precisely the footage characteristics, or the problem you're seeing