FCPX export quality & FCPX Vs Quicktime playback quality

[Joe Marler]

[Bret Williams] “the odd thing being that if he reimports that ProRes output back into X the banding disappears within the X viewer.”

Yes that is the mystery. There are two ways to proceed:

(1) Try the playback on more platforms, e.g, retina MacBook, Roxio Player, Quicktime Pro 7, Windows/VLC, Windows Media Player, etc. Note any differences. If he could upload a brief clip probably lots of people could try it.

(2) Examine the technical characteristics of the video file with MediaInfo, Invisor, or Exiftool, and compare those to a similarly-encoded file with similar subject material (dark monocolor gradients) which does not exhibit those characteristics.

One possibility is the X viewer has some kind of smoothing logic built in which lessens the banding.

His concern is understandable because he can’t expect people to use FCPX for playback. Even though casual viewers won’t notice the difference, as content producers we have a more sensitive threshold for things like this. Also if it is re-encoded (say for Youtube/Vimeo upload) the effect might be magnified. Understanding the root cause might come in handy later.