Video darkening when zooming in and out stills in Final Cut Express

[beallio]

I've made an 18 minute video in Final Cut Express and after exporting (H.264 using Best qualities and my size is HD-1280X720) when my stills start they are bright, but once it starts zooming the video will darken and when it's finished zooming it returns to normal brightness.

There is actually one picture that comes to mind where it did not darken- which makes no sense since there's nothing unique about it.

The stills are shot from high-end Nikon DSLRs in RAW .NEF format that I converted to highest quality JPEG in Photoshop. So I'm starting with the highest quality JPEGs possible (average size is 9 MB each).

I did a Ken Burns effect using keyframes (in case anyone is interested). But this darkening does not show up when I view it within Final Cut Express, only after exporting.

This video has 150 stills and roughly 10 minutes of HD footage of a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park, I'd like the pictures to look as good as possible on my DVD.

I appreciate any help for this.

 

[lighthouse_man]

Make sure you did not tamper with the opacity settings on the pictures.
And if not, burn a DVD and watch if the problem persists.

 

[chiefroastbeef]

Did you export it straight to quicktime without compressing into .mov?

I had a similar problem to yours with one of my videos, except my video footage darkens at transition points (darkens at around 2 stops!). It only does it if I export it full sized to quicktime, however, if I compress it to mov, the darkening problem is gone. I never really figured out if it was some setting I messed with, because it only happened to that particular project. All my other ones were fine whether I export full size or compressed.

Just from my experience.

 

[xStep]

See if using a TIFF image instead makes a difference. In the back of my mind I'm thinking it will. Sorry, I can't recall why I think this?

 

[beallio]

Solved!

It was the opacity. Crazy stuff but on a few of my JPEGs the opacity went down to 96-98% but was at 100% during transitions. It's a weird thing, but it works now and looks great! Thanks for all the suggestions.