Minimizing Gradient banding…

[Jerry Hofmann]

What version of FCP? If 6, try editing in a ProRes sequence. It’s 10 bit instead of DV’s 8 bit, and would fix up those gradient bandings…

If you have an earlier version of FCP, might try a 10 bit uncompressed sequence setting for this… it too is 10 bit, but the renders are not going to play back from a slow disk drive…

Jerry

[Bob Pierce]

Hi, Thanks for the input. I’m using ver 5 right now and have tried changing the sequence setting to 10 bit uncompressed. I’ve rendered bits of it with the new setting but still see the banding. Now, I should say that I’m monitoring with a firewire connected dv deck (with an NTSC monitor) so maybe what I’m seeing is still dvd related artifact. I tried rendering out a small sample of the sequence as a quicktime (at “current settings”) to view on the desktop with QT player and still could see quite obvious banding. Hrmph!
bob

[Bob Pierce]

I just read on an after effects forum about this: a common solution is to apply some noise from photoshop’s “Add noise” filter. I did so on the gradient fade ( a seperate layer) and shazam!! No more banding!
Bob

[Gary Adcock]

[BobP] “I just read on an after effects forum about this: a common solution is to apply some noise from photoshop’s “Add noise” filter. I did so on the gradient fade ( a seperate layer) and shazam!! No more banding!”

yeah
thats a very old technique for resolving banding issues in printed material (that ink on paper stuff). Occasionally you need to reduce the quality to get better results.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Bob Pierce]

It actually added a graininess that in this context actually a nice touch. Just a tiny amount is required for an amazing improvement.
Thanks!
Bob

[Jerry Hofmann]

I’m pretty sure that you can’t just change the sequence’s settings… you need to start with a 10 bit sequence.

Once you’ve put anything in a sequence it becomes that setting, and just changing the current sequence to whatever causes the clips in say the DV sequence to go thru DV before they “upconvert” as it were… Just for kicks try a new sequence, put the problem banding clip in it from the browser. Report back if it didn’t fix the banding issue.

Jerry

[Joe Murray]

>>>I’m pretty sure that you can’t just change the sequence’s settings… you need to start with a 10 bit sequence.

This used to be the case but recently I’ve noticed that changing the sequence settings works differently than it used to. For instance a DVCPro50 sequence with 10 bit clips has to render, but change the settings to 10 bit and the clips play realtime. Not sure when this changed.