Avoiding Moiré Pattern

Check your output in both HD and SD.

Ever seen a man in herring bone pattern jacket on TV? The annoying artifact is called

moiré pattern and is most often seen in fine detail textile patterns and motion control camera moves on magazine and book photographs.

The interference pattern is caused by a specific mathematical relationship between the sampling sizes of video raster, monitor and the fine, repetitive detail in thr photographed subject.

Avoiding moiré in SD is fairly straightforward. You could have a wardrobe change for example and the ugly interference will go away. SD is what-you-see-is-what-you-get.

Avoiding moiré in HD edited masters is not a simple matter. Because HD can and will get downconverted to SD or crossconverted to another HD format even if you don’t see the moiré now in HD it may appear in subsequent versions.

To add insult to injury, moiré is dependent on the pixel count of the display device. The proliferation of LCD monitors has made it impossible to account for every eventuality because LCD monitors come in variety of different pixel dimensions.

So, how do we avoid moiré? Avoid clothing with fine repetitive detail. Avoid using printed images unless they are continuous tone images such as optically developed photographs or better quality digital prints.