VS 2018 Vertical black bands appear after rendering mpeg4

[guy_mike]

An odd, new problem in VS Ultimate 2018 - never had this happen before in any of my many previous projects. After doing auto pan/zoom on a series of photos, when previewing project, each photo completely fills the 16:9 Preview screen with movement . However, after using the Share button to create a video file, in both mpeg2 and mpeg4 choices, on some of the photos, black vertical bands now show up. Sometimes they are on both sides of the photo, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left. Sometimes as the pan zoom occurs, the black vertical lines go away due to the pan/zoom movement. Sometimes they stay even if they should have gone away with pan/zoom. This has never happened in any of my previous projects. Previously, the rendered video looks exactly like what I see on the Preview screen in Edit. Not anymore. I have tested and tried various and sundry things to see if I can figure out what is caused the problem -- like deleting all transitions and re-dragging and dropping transitions, selecting all the photos and re-doing auto pan zoom, manually customize pan/zoom after auto pan zoom - this seems to fix the problem for that individual photo, but I am not sure if it fixes it every time. I really would like to know what caused it. This is a dilemma because I dont want the black vertical bands on my computer or tv screen. Pretty crappy look for a video.

[tletter]

using the Share button to create a video file, in both mpeg2 and mpeg4 choices, on some of the photos, black vertical bands now show up

Ensure that the Project Properties set on the Edit tab match those selected on the Share tab before rendering.

tletter
https://www.youtube.com/user/tletter

[guy_mike]

Will take a look. Will be surprised if they dont match because I have made no changes to the Project Properties on the Edit tab since I bought, and set up, VS Ultimate 2018 over a year ago. I hope you have hit on something. Will let you know.

[guy_mike]

OK - when I first checked, the project properties in the Edit tab were set to ONLINE (dont know how or when this choice changed from DVD). So I selected DVD and made sure the project properties in the Share tab then matched exactly what was showing in the Edit tab. Then created an mpeg2 file. No change - project still filled up Preview panel but vertical black bands in many of the photos in video. So created the video file again by clicking box in the Share tab that said something like "use the settings from project settings." The vertical black bands were still there in the resulting video - no change. This is not making much sense to me because I do not know how it happened and it has never happened before. Have you ever heard about something like this before? Any other ideas?

[lata]

Hi
What are the sizes of your images in px
Are the bars showing to the left and right of the images or through the images?

Why are you using Pan and Zoom, to fill the screen or to use the pan effect?
If you are simply zooming in to fill the screen then try Customise Motion to see if the bars disappear.

Images using non – standard sizes seem to be having issues.
There are other posts referring to image problems
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=65259&p=367519#p367519

[guy_mike]

I shoot my pics in 4:3 format (pic size is usually about 850kb), add them to timeline (with system supplied 1 second transition between pics), select them all and do auto pan/zoom to add motion. I then review each pic and if I want to change the motion to emphasize a different area of pic, I double click the pic and then click customize pan/zoom and change the motion by changing the location and the size of the box that shows up in the pan zoom module. I think I use the animate choice (not static or one other choice). I have done this with 1000's of pics and many projects. Never a problem before. Current problem - on first pic, some ghosting, semi transparent vertical black bars on first pic (left and right), then on following pics some pics fill screen perfectly, but some have vertical bars on left and right, left alone, and right alone. Sometimes with the motion, the bars go away, other times only one side goes away. About 2 weeks ago I finished a 63 minute project that had many hundred pics and no prob. In current project, there are never black vertical bars in the Preview screen - they only show up on the video. I would be more than happy to create a small file edited version of the project and let you take a look at it.

[lata]

Hi Mike
It would be good if you can create a short project, you will have to Smart Package, zip and upload to a sharing site.

I have tried to replicate the black bands but without seeing your project difficult to understand
I did see some annoying effects with using Crossfade and panning on portrait images as the effect ran over the left and right borders, that I believe is with using portrait images.

Obviously if we pan to far we run out of the image frame into the border and that will give the effect of seeing a border.
Ideally 16:9 shape images should be used.
Could you take a snapshot of the black bars
I have to say what I see on the preview is what I get after rendering, no extra bars

[guy_mike]

I will work on getting a short version of the project I am having trouble with to you early next week. Like you, in the past since 2014 going back to VS version 8, on the many projects using 1000s of photos (overall) I have done, my rendered video always looks exactly the same as the Preview screen. I have always used 4:3 format (and never had a problem) because it provides me more "top" of the picture to work with when determining exactly what I want to emphasize on the pic. I know how to use Smart Package but am not an expert at getting the file to a shared site. I have used wetransfer with great success in the past but I would need a general shared email address.

[guy_mike]

OK - I have figured out what happened. I did some more messing around with the project that had the vertical band problem on the video. When I created the project, I did not review Project Properties under Settings. I did an auto pan/zoom to each picture, then manually customized each pic if I wanted to change the movement in the picture vs allowing what VS 2018 did automatically. When previewing the project, each picture filled the Preview window. There were no vertical bands on either side of any of the pics. I DID NOT NOTICE THAT THE PICTURE IN THE PREVIEW WINDOW WAS NOT AS QUITE AS WIDE AS MY FORMER PROJECTS. I then used SHARE and created the video in MPEG-2 settings of 16:9, 720x480, frame based. The resulting video had vertical black bands on almost all of the pictures - sometimes left, sometimes right, and sometimes both sides. As the pan/zoom happened, depending on how I had customized the movement, the vertical black bands sometimes went away and sometimes did not. This had never happened before. When I looked closely at the Project Properties in Settings, I noticed that Project Format had somehow been changed from DVD to ONLINE. So when the Project was created, the resulting size of the pics were not as wide as in DVD Format. So when I created the video in MPEG2, I used DVD type format which must be wider than ONLINE Project format. Thus on many pics, vertical black bands were introduced. After this happened, when looking back at Project in the Preview area, I noticed the black bands. They had not been there when I first created the Project in ONLINE format but they were there now. As a test, I reloaded the original Project that had mistakenly been created in ONLINE format. I went to Project Properties in Settings and changed ONLINE format to DVD format. There was a warning message that appeared about cashe and some other things changing. I clicked YES (not CANCEL) and black vertical bands appeared in the Preview area on many of the pics - based on how I had customized pan zoom. The relevant teaching point for me, is to always make sure DVD format is chosen for the project. Evidently, this is 16:9 and the ONLINE format is ??:9 format. ONLINE format looks close to the same width size but is a bit less wide. My challenge is now to try and figure out a way to NOT have to re-customize all the pics in which vertical lines have appeared. I may have to just redo each pic. Hard lesson.