Flicker removal on horizontal lines and screen capture text

Question

Hi All,
I often have to include a PC screen capture (such as an Excel screen) in a video. How do I minimise the amount of flicker when playing back on a CRT.
I understand the problem is in the interlacing. I have tried the anti-flicker filter and this just seems to make things softer without much improvement in the flicker.
I have seen a post which recommends using progressive frames for still images but does not explain how to do this.
Any assistance gratefully received!
Regards,
Duncan Rosie.

Answer 1

> If you are making NTSC projects, keep within the color gamut (15-235).
That should be 16-235. And, assuming you are working with RGB files, Premiere and/or Encore will automatically scale the RGB to fit within the 16-235 luminance range. PAL also uses the same legal luminance range. It is not exclusive to NTSC.
Here is decent trick -- it may not eliminate your flicker, but it will greatly help offset the severe blurring that occurs when applying Anti-flicker or variants of this technique (such as a vertical gaussian blur) to screen captures of GUIs, spreadsheets, etc.
1.) Open the screen capture bitmap file in Photoshop and scale it to exactly 200% using "Nearest Neighbor" resizing
2.) Bring that file into Premiere and use Motion to scale it to fit (scale with be 50% of what it was before you resized it)
3.) Apply Anti-flicker filter as neeeded
The nearest neightbor resizing method makes for "blocky" resizing that is horrendous with photos, but it ideal for screen captures -- so long as you only scale by 200%, %300, %400, etc.
This generates "extra pixels" by replicating exisitng ones that will help:
a.) The appearance of the image when scaled to compensate for aspect ratio
b.) Maintain better legibility even when strong softening filters (such as Anti-flicker @ 1.0) are applied
c.) Allow for tighter zoom-ins of your screen shots while maintaining relatively sharp edges