Strange banding on Premiere CS6 exports…

[Vince Becquiot]

This could be due to some heavy color correction on compressed footage?

If this was recorded in H.264, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for levels adjustments and grading before ugly artifacts show up.

This is the technique that I’ve been using for dealing with DSLR footage.

Import the footage into After Effects and create a 16bit composition.

Use a Denoiser or Neat Video.

Apply a versy small amount of dither by adding an tiny amount of noise to the cleaned up footage.

Export as a 10bit ProRes 422 file.

Vince Becquiot

Indigo Live
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Richard Lacey]

Thanks for the reply. The problem appeared with and without the grade.

I just imported the completed Premiere CS6 project into CS5 and exported from there.
No ‘digital rain’ to be seen. Clearly an issue with Premiere CS6 or the encoder it uses.

[Dennis Radeke]

Given that it didn’t have a problem in CS5, perhaps it had to do with a codec contained in AME. one thing to try is export to HP (high profile) as opposed to MP (main profile) when creating longGOP material. That solved another person’s banding issues with his BMD camera.

[Richard Lacey]

I’d been exporting in HP all along, MP had the same results.

[Phillip Todd]

Since you mentioned “Digital Rain” That’s a term I am familiar with from also shooting with a hacked GH2. Sounds like a combo of PPro CS6 and the hack used.

The work around is like in FCP7 to transcode everything before editing (or transcode and replace if already edited).

Discussions here:
https://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/6094/diagonal-rain-appears-using-gh2-premiere-pro-cs6-without-a-hack/p1
https://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/3804/strange-pulsing-diagonal-pattern-in-gh2-hack-footage-aka-rain/p1

Luckily, I have never had the problem myself.

Note if transcoding and relinking:
The redundant AVCHD file naming convention can really screw you up with PPro’s non containg folder aware search method. Ex: If A cam 0000.mts goes offline PPro will ask “Where’s 0000.mts”” and if more than one 0000.mts is missing it will replace all with that single 0000.mts, even if the 2nd files was from another day or a 2nd camera on the same day.

FCP7 would ask “Where’s 2013/11/1>A cam>0000.mov” so it was easy to feed it the correct files when relinking. PPro (on the mac at least) is not aware what the containing folders were.

My personal workaround involves using a small app called “name changer” to change the names of the .mts files and “pre-pend” them with date/project/camera + 0000.mts This breaks the XMP metadata function, but, makes for headache free editing if the source files get moved (say if you’re on a laptop with an external drive for media files).

In your case, if you needed to finish in CS6, I’d back up the project file, transcode the files and give them prepended names as I mentioned above. Then with PPro open, go move one batch (or SD camera chip) of AVCHD files at a time. Say if you shot with 2 cameras, each with one chip, move just the A camera. PPro will ask where’s 0000.mts and you can relink it to your “2014_1_3_Project_A1_0000.mov” and check that everything shows up clearly, save the project, then do it for the B cam, check, save, and so on, until every “chip” from the project source files is replaced with your transcoded files. Always double check.

Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
http://www.phillip-todd.com

[Richard Lacey]

Thanks for your extensive reply Philip!
I think I’ll go that route for the final version.

Luckily youtube’s compression hid the digital rain a little for the competition submission of my film.
Here’s the short in all it’s dodgy video glory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SALITAYreQE

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