still banding: now what?

[Walter Biscardi]

Starting new threads every few days for the exact same issue does two things.

Annoys the hell of us to keep seeing your same topic in multiple threads posted by the same person.

Makes it difficult for people to follow along to see what has been suggested to solve your issue since you keep breaking up your issue into multiple threads.

One thread per issue makes it easier for everyone to help you.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Jerry Hofmann]

As I said earlier. 8 bit video will always show up with some banding. You need to shoot and edit 10 bit video. And you also should be using the high quality motion processing set from the sequence’s settings’ video processing tab.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’m with Jerry. Capture @ 10bit.

Jeremy

[Andwon]

Many thanks for your help kind sirs; especially for your patience.

jerry i tried the normal, fastest (linear), and best with very little difference.
i’ve never experienced (or noticed?) this issue in previous versions of final cut.
i guess it’s a bit dissapointing since 2 continuous streams at 30%
will be playing throughout the program.

is the only solution to having decent looking vision for this program, is to reshoot and cut it in 10bit? oucheehuahua!

many thanx,

-andwon

[Jeff Coleman]

[Andwon] “is the only solution to having decent looking vision for this program, is to reshoot and cut it in 10bit? oucheehuahua!”

I don’t believe you can shoot digi in 10bit. I believe its an 8bit compressed recording device.
Instead, capture in a 10bit codec like Apple 10bit uncompressed, but even it has some issues.
Here’s some links regarding Sheer Video codecs
https://www.lafcpug.org/reviews/review_sheer_video.html
Sheer offers a free tryout
https://www.bitjazz.com/en/products/sheervideo/
At times I’ve had better luck scaling with something like Boris Continuim plug-ins, but I don’t recall it ever fixing a banding issue.
let us know what you learn
(on this thread, please)

[Jeremy Garchow]

Yeah, don’t reshoot, just recapture to 10bit.

[Andwon]

Um,

I captured digibeta in 10bit PAL. scaled it to 30% in a 10bit PAL timeline. I don’t really see any improvement, slight if any improvement at all.
I’ll try another capture monday with some other footage to verify.

my small mind is quite amazed that it’s not possible to scale video downward without distortion in the 21st century with FCP6.

thanx for the interest and help

-andwon

[Nils Crompton]

The normal way to avoid banding when manipulating images is to add a bit of gaussian monchromatic noise to the image in the step before whatever it is you do that causes banding. you have to play around to get the right balance of noise/banding.

Its the same principal as dithering in gif images…

nils

[Andwon]

ok nils, i’m up for anything. is this done with FCP filters? you got some instructions to lay on me? the only thing i’m doing at this point is scaling the video down to 30%, so there’s no before, if you know what i mean-andwon

“add a bit of gaussian monchromatic noise to the image in the step before whatever it is you do that causes banding”

[Nils Crompton]

OK,

If it happens as you scale the image then you can apply the noise to the clip at this stage – no need to nest it or pre-process it.

In FCP use: Effects/Video Filters/Stylize/Add Noise

Set to, Gaussian, monochrome, rest to default, then set amount to 0.01 and increase until it eliminates banding but before you notice it.

Not sure if you need to auto animate or not, I’d say if you can see the noise then you need to animate it – or it will appear unnatural, otherwise leave it as static.

This is a trick that designers use all the time when making gradients in 8-bit design files. It is worth remembering that most broadcast work will end up being displayed as 8-bit ultimately (i.e. high bitrate MPEG2) so working in a 10-bit workflow doesn’t guarantee that the end viewer wont get banding. I’d say the reason you are getting banding is because your image is ‘too clean’.

Cheers,

Nils