How do I prevent distortion of photography during scale animation

[David_at_Summit]

I have a simple 30-second animation (video linked below) which is causing an unintended ripple distortion to an included photograph while it is being slowly scaled. It only occurs for about 3 seconds (time index 00:00:14 to 00:00:17), but is prominantly obvious on the subject faces. How do I prevent this from occuring?

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

You can't entirely avoid sampling artifacts. It's just computer math and using a slow move on a compressed format where the block distribution will change every few frames will always amplify this, anyway. You can only play with stuff like the layer quality settings, motion blur and the overall timing. With regards to the latter it's pretty much the same issue as with "juddering credit rolls/ newstickers" and similar. The motion needs to be timed to fall into full increments or even fractions of it to look reasonably smooth. Again, this is nothing you can fix with soem technical wizardry, it's a design problem. In your case it may be wise to use multiple images and in addition to the scaling also add slight panning with motion blur enabled...

Mylenium

[David_at_Summit]

Thank you, Mylenium. I took your advice about adding slight panning. It didn't eliminate the ripple distortion anomaly, but DID make it much less noticeable. Once I saw this was working favorably, I finished cleaning up the motion and found it helped even more. So, the lessen here is to add motion to reduce inherent ripple distortion anomalies made prominant by slow scaling.