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Weirdness on Export
I made a simple background in Motion to replace a green screen in some corporate talking head pieces. Inside of FCPX and Motion, it looks great. When I export the video from FCPX, whether as ProRess 422 or Uncompressed 10-bit, I get these concentric circles:
I thought maybe my original file was too low res or something, so I went back and rebuilt it from scratch in Motion. The color solids are not resized, only reshaped with masks. The new, rebuilt version did the same thing on export.
Backgrounds from within FCPX’s Generators export with no problem.
Any ideas?
FCPX 10.0.8, Motion 5.07
Exported ProRes 4:2:2 and Uncompressed 10-bit Quicktime. Then converted to H.264 via Adobe Media Encoder. All files come out looking this way.
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14 Replies
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That looks like fairly typical H.264 banding- and why involve Adobe Media Encoder when FCPX/Compressor can go right to H.264?
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Compression artifact would also be my first thought. Do you see the banding in the ProRes 422 or the Uncompressed video?
– Ronny
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Make sure you are rendering ‘best’ quality from motion.
I’d also try and use x264 for your encode.
Handbrake uses it. You can purchase an add on for Episode.
Or you can set it up with Compressor: https://library.creativecow.net/lawrence_david/Video-Purifier_and_x264/1
No matter what, h264 is a lossy 8bit codec. It will band.
You can try to dither the background a bit to help reduce banding by adding a tiny bit of noise with the add noise filter.
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My original post may not have been clear – I exported it as both Pro Res HQ and Uncompressed QT, and they both look like that even before the transcode, so i’s not the H.264.
I don’t use Compressor because we don’t have it in the studio. They bought FCPX for editing and After Effects for effects. (I had to push them to get Motion, mainly so I can make custom titles and themes for FCPX).
Media Encoder came with After Effects, so I use that to convert my Master Files to other formats. Regardless, it looks like that even in ProRes HQ or Uncompressed QT.
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[Sam Comer] “Media Encoder came with After Effects, so I use that to convert my Master Files to other formats. Regardless, it looks like that even in ProRes HQ or Uncompressed QT.”
Are you are viewing it on an 8bit display?
If you could view it in a 10bit pipeline on a 10bit monitor, there would be no banding.
Regardless, you can add minimal noise to the bg layer it will reduce the banding.
It’s an old trick that still works.
The frame grab you supplied seems highly compressed. Any chance you can upload one frame of full res ProResHQ?
Jeremy
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[Sam Comer] “I don’t use Compressor because we don’t have it in the studio.”
I’ve begun using the free MPEG StreamClip over Compressor for some things these days because the H.264 or x264 output is also viewable on Android devices H.264 from Compressor and FCP X are not at least without some tweaking that I haven’t been able to find). I have no idea if your issue is the app method of export, but you could download MPEG StreamClip and give it a try. And yes, if you have the x264 codec loaded, it will see it and will become an option when you choose “Export as MPEG4…”
Dave
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This is my point/problem. That IS a screen grab from the Uncompressed QT.
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But it’s a screengrab (a jpeg or png, or something).
I need a one frame .mov
Make sense?
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I have a frame from the Motion file saved as “Save Current Frame.” It is a 16MB tiff file (too big to upload here). It looks like the screen grab. (Note that screen grabs of background that export as normal look normal, too).
I exported a 1 frame only .mov as Uncompressed 10-bit. It looks the same. I uploaded it to the COW just a big ago, but I’m afraid it’s going to compress it.
https://reels.creativecow.net/film/one-frame-only
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You would need to zip it and upload it as a file.
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