[Jon Merrifield]

I typically don’t see any banding on my computer monitors, mac book, cheap HP, etc. But I do on my FSI2450. The acid test is to view it on your television or if you see some of your work broadcast.

I was going to get a 10bit FSI at first, but my colorist friend, who does very high end color work on SpeedGrade and also uses 8bit FSI’s, suggested 8bit to see what it is when truly in the broadcast world.

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX

[Jon Merrifield]

That’s Interesting Erik, I would assume that any artifacts that are the result of the 8bit rendering will remain but your 10bit monitor will not produce any new ones….

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX

[Jon Merrifield]

Hi Erik, yes, the lowest I work in is 16bit and usually do all my VFX in 32 bit and render DPX LOG sequences, of course, I still have an 8bit reference monitor (since television broadcast and most of my work is for broadcast and is 8bit and I am stickler for accurate reference).

If you do a grad in 32 bit, you will get banding on any 8bit monitor. just saying…
I rarely use the 8bit filters and when I do, I use the HDR compander utility.

cheers

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX

[Jon Merrifield]

Awesome, Thanks Kevin

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX

[Jon Merrifield]

sorry. didn’t see previous post.
I work for the department of redundancy department

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX

[Jon Merrifield]

You can restore the background (clean) of your comp over the top and use a mask with a feathered edge mask as one simple example…

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX

[Jon Merrifield]

Channel Blur, that’s a good idea John, thank you.

this is a broadcast issue for me and the images I am working on are so high end, very detailed in quality and fine tuned to exacting beauty, fashion work for example, that the noise of web versions is a non-issue and of course I basically add grain blur, add grain again, all in subtle ways to reduce the banding.

Thanks again for your excellent suggestion.

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX

[Jon Merrifield]

That’s awesome, I am glad that worked for you.
cheers,
-Jon

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX

[Jon Merrifield]

Hi Mike,

There should be a “Uninstall Adobe After Effects CS4” inside the your=hard-drive/applications/Adobe After Effects CS4…. should look like below but pointing to CS4, I just went to my CS5.5 as a demo…

“Repair Permissions” is part of OSX and third party softwares do it too as I mentioned with ONYX which is free and I use but always back up first. But you can do a “Repair Permissions” from “Disk Utility” which is an app that comes with your mac, you can launch it from a Spotlight search or just navigate to it in the application/utilities folder. Easy to follow once in. You should google this too. Doesn’t really do much on its own in my opinion but combined with some other system optimizing tasks contributes to the general health of your systems operation.

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX

[Jon Merrifield]

This is just a guess…
Usually when these things occur (too often, because they do happen) there is something corrupt in your system. I regularly run cleaning software on our systems (ONYX). there are many, that repair permissions can clean caches etc. Also, left over preferences from you previous version may or may not be an issue. If I choose to keep an older version around, I usually hide in some part of my drive partition where the system doesn’t go an look for it. A clean uninstall, permissions repair, and clean install often cure these things. However, I have also had to start over with a clean install of the OS when upgrading to 10.7 on our one system which was not a pleasant experience but everything is running smooth now. I would consider doing a system wide clean and repair at your upgrade time which may help avoid continued problems.
Again, I may be completely wrong. I hit SAVE every few minutes in AE just out of habit in an effort to not loose things.

Jon Merrifield
VFX Artist / Supervisor
PELi Studios, Austin TX