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Banding Compresor or FInal Cut?
Hi Everyone,
I have a problem with banding and do not know if it is a FCP or Compressor problem?
-I shot a film, which each scene has, almost exclusively fog in it.
-The work was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II.
-I transcoded the original Canon H.264 footage Apple ProRes 422 for Progressive material (High Quality) to work with it in FCP.
-Everything looks great up until this point and in the FCP Canvas
-I then export it out to a H.264, Best Quality, 1920×1080, 30fps, 2500 Data rate and all the fog looks banded. The fog that had wonderful values and tones now looks like just 4-5 shades of gray with big lines separating them. UGGH!The footage looks bad in a QuickTime Player window on the computer and on a WD TV player and through a HD projector.
I am assuming the banding is happening in the compression stage but why. What can I do to prevent it? Should I try another codec?
Stephan
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5 Replies
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Your data rate is about 1/15th of the camera original and a long way down from ProRes. Try a higher data rate. You may have to do a test with a small section till you find a compromise between size and banding. I presume you used Compressor and not quicktime conversion. Compressor is better.
H264 is supposed to be very good with lower data rates but if you go that low, something has to give.
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I had originally had the Dat Rate set to Automatic but I started to get stuttering on the WD TV player. the banding was there on the Automatic setting as well.
hmmmm?
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Your computer monitor is 8b, so no banding-free.
2500 is too low data rate for 1920. H264 is better codec than MPEG-2 but doesn’t makes miracles.
I wouldn’t go lower than 10Mbps (a decent SD MPEG-2 goes around 5Mbps).Are you setting the “Frame Control ON”?
Otherwise Compressor will works only at 8b.Are you setting “key-frames” Automatic?
Rafael -
Thanks for the advice Rafael!
! will change the Bit Rate to 10 Mbps as you recommended.
I have turned on the Frame Control to On and then set everything to Best.
The key frame is set to 24. do you think that is all right?
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[stephan hill] “The key frame is set to 24. do you think that is all right? “
Think that normal MPEG-2 have a Key-frame every 15 frames as the most.
The more k-frames, more quality.
If you limit the data-rate, you better let the k-frames in Auto.
The double-pass will optimize the number of k-frames.
rafael
PS: When limiting the number of k-frames, Data-rate should be let in Auto.
If you want to limit both (Data-rate and K-frames) you must be very sure of what you are doing.
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