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Is Adobe Premiere to blame for banding in 8bit DSLR footage?


Andrew Reid
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I am experiencing a problem with Adobe Premiere which destroys the quality of Canon 1D C footage. It’s a problem which has always been attributed to the camera and others like it – banding with an 8bit codec. But actually, could the software you use to edit material play a role?

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This is great stuff to know Andrew thanks for the information. This is the area where I need to keep on top of for work and for myself when starting with a lower quality video its very important to keep what detail was available in the source footage. The image you posted with the issue resolved...looks awesome.

I know Avid announced changees to DnxHD to include 2k, 4k and 6k but Im not sure when this is going to be available.

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I know Avid announced changees to DnxHD to include 2k, 4k and 6k but Im not sure when this is going to be available.

​These larger raster sizes are already available in Avid Media Composer 8.3, which was released in December.

The new codecs are called DNxHR (as opposed to DNxHD) and I expect they will ripple through 3rd party products (Resolve, etc.) in the very near future.

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It's unfortunate not to see any mention of Final Cut Pro X in this article. 

The release of the new design troubled many Final Cut Pro 7 users, but the majority who were annoyed at the drastic changes seem not to have experienced what it is like today. 

You should definitely try FCPX as it's grown into an incredible program that is very intuitive, easy and fast to use, has top notch pulgin support and most of all - makes editing fun and leaves more time to be more creative.

I've also heard several editors mention that the quality of the exported files from FCPX are much better than those from Premiere. I know that Noam Kroll did a blog post about it. 

I recommend that you get into FCPX Andrew, as it sounds like you are not satisfied with Premiere. The bad press it got on release is irrelevant now. It is absolutely fantastic now. More editors need to wake up!! ;) 

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That's indeed very good to know, but i'm not surprised, Resolve really is an excellent transcoder.

That being said, i'm not sure you should cancel your creative cloud altogether for this, that's kinda of a drastic move !

The fact is trying to edit natively MJEPG in Premiere is something it should never be supposed to do. Ok it may work because computer are now very powerful, and it may take it. But the workflow you have now, should have been you workflow from the start (not specifically i mean, but the transcoding step to proresLT). Doing that it may seem as an extra step and lost time to some, but you said it yourself, you get better editable files, lighter and cleaner. You can then put your MJPEGS to the trash, who would want them anyway ? ;)

Plus, Resolve lite being free, it doesn't actually cost you more. 

You would lose a lot more than Premiere, which still is a great editing tool. 

I love Resolve as a grading software, but it's not there yet as a complete, true, NLE. (but it's taking the right path though).

Don't be too angry at Premiere, even Avid has gamma shift issues sometimes when exporting (which i find astonishing...in a bad way...). Transcoding and Color science really are another game i guess, and Resolve does it perfectly. 

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I'm cutting some films right now in FCPX using the 'raw' 4k footage from my Canon 1DC and it's no hassle at all. On slower machines you can just set it to create proxy Prores LT files in the background while you edit. Editing in Resolve!?!

​The problem is not the hassle... it's the handling of the signal when transcoding in said Prores...

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first world problems... 1 out of 100 will notice this after downloading the clip and not watching your video on vimeo or youtube. IF it is uploaded and watchable. 

​no, I strongly disagree - and not that only Andre alone has this problem, it was even discussed in another forum before with no other solution or suggestion than changing the NLE.

A simple fade out to black could look really, really sh1tty, unbelievable bad with banding and colour shifts in all directions and yes, I have tried a lot of different codecs, too. 

It's Premiere, period.

At least on my system.

Or better said, it was PP for me - I'm really sick with this overrated piece of buggy **** which was contaminating my HDs.

At least, it's not me - you make me a very happy man, Andrew, a new dawn of time.

And this time it's not ironic. :-)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It's unfortunate not to see any mention of Final Cut Pro X in this article. 

The release of the new design troubled many Final Cut Pro 7 users, but the majority who were annoyed at the drastic changes seem not to have experienced what it is like today. 

You should definitely try FCPX as it's grown into an incredible program that is very intuitive, easy and fast to use, has top notch pulgin support and most of all - makes editing fun and leaves more time to be more creative.

I've also heard several editors mention that the quality of the exported files from FCPX are much better than those from Premiere. I know that Noam Kroll did a blog post about it. 

I recommend that you get into FCPX Andrew, as it sounds like you are not satisfied with Premiere. The bad press it got on release is irrelevant now. It is absolutely fantastic now. More editors need to wake up!! ;) 

​Hey Oliver, it looks like Adobe fixed that issue: http://noamkroll.com/adobe-premiere-pro-vs-final-cut-pro-x-round-2-h264-compression-update/

FCPX is indeed a cool editing app, I use it from time to time (along with Motion- also excellent and 'underrated') to see how far it has come along. One reason I still use Premiere is it provides a lot more control for audio editing (prefer doing as much as possible in one app vs. round tripping to Audition, Protools, etc.). The other reason is Premiere also runs on Windows (where for the most part it runs faster (but not always- a recent project required finishing in OSX as the NVidia drivers had freezing issues in Windows).

Regarding another way to solve the banding problem- ffmpeg could be used to transcode MJPEG to ProRes 444 10-bit. While Resolve 11 is mostly GPU accelerated, it's not clear if the MJPEG decoder and/or ProRes encoder are GPU accelerated (would guess they are using standard libraries/licensed, etc. and perhaps are not GPU accelerated). I recently complied ffmpeg for the first time (to get 10-bit 422 support for H.264), and if there's interest in custom software tools to help with production (with features not available in existing products), I'm open to suggestions to potentially develop them.

Andrew- could you post a very short 1DC clip which has the banding issue so I can run some tests?

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Nice to know I wasn't losing my mind or eyesight. Or that my screen was going? Thought I was the only one seeing this. Haven't noticed this problem with Sony Vegas which I also use for some stuff. Shooting mostly GH4. Got the Adobe CC so I could work more easily cross platform with you Apple guys (I'm pc) and I do like Premiere for a lot of stuff, but the banding thing just has to get fixed. Wouldn't rush to toss your CC subscription just yet Andrew. Some stuff like the excellent highlight recovery in ACR is a pretty useful (if slow) tool to have. And there is After Effects which is hard to totally replace.

I think we should all collectively SQUAWK LOUDLY to Adobe though and see how responsive they are to this problem. One advantage to the cloud is the ease of distributing the fix. And if they aren't prompt with getting this right I might drop my subscription then too. It has been a bumpy ride with CC. Had all my personal info. hacked early on. Gave them the benefit of the doubt and the trust that it wouldn't happen again...but even we patient folk have limits!

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A couple things you might want to also check (I see you've done a lot), make sure there is no transcoding or conforming happening on import, I'm assuming there isn't because it would be an obvious thing to check (this is akin to rendering media on import), some software does that automatically. Then to test your theory "What I think Premiere might be doing is remapping the 0-255 MJPEG material to the broadcast standard 16-235 " also check with an eye dropper etc in Premiere to see if your blacks and whites are still full range (0-255), this will rule out gamma scaling issues due to possibly working in a rec709 project. If there is no transcoding/conforming on import and no gamma/LUT applied, then I'm not sure why the banding is baked in even when rendering unncompressed, very odd.  Also, you can do a test with an image sequence of the same clip at 8bit uncompressed just to be sure it's definitely something relating to mjpeg movie files. 

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IIRC, you can edit in 16-bits in Premiere and output in 10-bits when exporting/rendering. Have you tried this?

 

You can also edit in 16 and 32-bit in After Effects and output the same in various formats in the render queue. Have you tried pulling in your project with banding via Dynamic Link and turning on 32bpc and then rendering out to 8-bit video, 10-bit or 16-bit formats?

 

http://blogs.adobe.com/VideoRoad/2010/06/understanding_color_processing.html

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