Jump to content

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


Andrew Reid
 Share

Recommended Posts

EOSHD Pro Color 5 for Sony cameras EOSHD Z LOG for Nikon CamerasEOSHD C-LOG and Film Profiles for All Canon DSLRs

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?

​Dynamic link seems to be 8-bits only. It will do the processing in AE in whatever bits you choose but when it comes to Premiere through Dynamic link, AE converts it to 8-bits after all the processing is done. I don't know if this has been updated.

Adobe has improved their listening capability a lot so people should file this as a bug in their bug/feature reporting site.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

​You don't need to transcode in FCPX, that's the point.

​But if you get the bad banding in FCPX, or when exporting, as some people seem to have experienced, what's the point ?

Furthermore, IMO you're always better off editing and grading Prores than MJPEG, the fact that your machine / software can take it in real time doesn't mean it's good for it, and that it handles it well in the end. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Administrators

FCPX is a bit too off topic for my liking :) After all the thread is about Premiere!! Expecting people to learn a whole new NLE because of a fixable problem with banding isn't going to wash so let's get back to the more constructive posts and there have been some great ones in this thread so far. Thanks guys.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for a great article Andrew. Wonder if Premiere also reads other formats incorrectly and if its only the "tip of an iceberg". 

@Andrew: Some tip for Your 5k iMac. If you hold Option while clicking on "Scaled" then it'll let you choose 5120x2880. So You are able to use 1:1 Pixel.

​Thanks for this tip! I have one as well and was wondering if that was possible.. Great to hear!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Why should one have to edit in Resolve? You can edit in Premiere and send the sequence to Resolve, then render there. I may be wrong, but I remember having read about the optical quality re-framing there:

Optical Quality Re-Framing

Colorists know that DaVinci Resolve has the highest quality reframing and resize tools in the industry. Now editors can reframe shots directly in the edit page and take advantage of the amazing optical quality sub pixel image processing in real time! 4K images look incredible when resized to HD and you can even reformat older standard definition footage for your HD and 4K projects!

It's the most elaborate math of scaling an image, and it seems to be better than Premiere (or FCP, for that matter). The editing tools were quite good, had the world around not evolved further. But that's OT, like Andrew wrote.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Would you mind sharing your project file and a source file - or at least let us know what settings you used? Unless you share this, it's rather meaningless. 
Is this image the output, or the preview? Did you render the timeline before this? In what codec? Did you watch at 100 %, or scaled? GPU acceleration or not? What sequence settings? What export settings? Did you use previews on export? SO many things can be set wrong.

Unless we get some details, and actually know what we see, we just have to take your word that you did everything correctly. Until we get some real facts this is bad info, since it's not possible to know if you're doing things right. A test done wrong is not a good test. A test done right is a good test. For this one, we have to guess. Please share the facts.
1 hr · Like

Link to comment
Share on other sites

*OT*:

Funny thing that Resolve 11.1.4 (available on the App Store) now adds even better interoperability with FCP X. It now (allegedly, had no time yet to test it) fully understands compound clips, synched clips and all retiming operations within FCP X. 11.1.4 does not yet show up on the official BM site. Just a sidenote ...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

You asked people to stop talking about FCPX? Looks like they might actually be interested. Why not let the thread develop organically instead controlling the narrative?

FCPX is a bit too off topic for my liking :) After all the thread is about Premiere!! Expecting people to learn a whole new NLE because of a fixable problem with banding isn't going to wash so let's get back to the more constructive posts and there have been some great ones in this thread so far. Thanks guys.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Andrew- I modified a slate to help test the Premiere issue. If you can import and do the same as with the other files, then render out highest settings RGB, I can compare to the source in nuke. Below is a plot scanline expression that tests the linear ramp at the end of the slate.

http://collectfolder.com/temp/slate_test_8bit_srgb_mjpeg.mov.zip

Would be happy to post the results to compare with the source, which is lossy mjpeg compressed 8bit sRGB gamma, full range. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16-235 is NTSC video levels. with analog video transmission now gone, black levels of 0 are acceptable in _digital_ video.. aka DV and other digital video formats.  The problem is the 1D is labeling its levels as 601 instead of 709…. or worse yet may be actually putting its image into 601 color space. this could easily cause color mismanagment with some apps if there is no other metadata in the clips to tell them the clip came from a 1D so you have to apply special case color management to correct for the 1D doing things wrong. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For PC I will recommend my workflow. Edit with the native on Premiere, then import the sequence on After Effects and grade in 16bit (or 32 if you prefer). Every thing is done with the native file. that recipe is banding free! 

​Do you have an ordinary timeline representation of Premiere sequences in AAE CC meanwhile? Or is it *still* the ugly aztec pyramid with the clips stacked in layers?

16-235 is NTSC video levels. with analog video transmission now gone, black levels of 0 are acceptable in _digital_ video.. aka DV and other digital video formats.  The problem is the 1D is labeling its levels as 601 instead of 709…. or worse yet may be actually putting its image into 601 color space. this could easily cause color mismanagment with some apps if there is no other metadata in the clips to tell them the clip came from a 1D so you have to apply special case color management to correct for the 1D doing things wrong. 

​Andrew wrote s.th. about 5D2RGB, didn't he? The purpose of this app is to choose the correct range, if your NLE doesn't.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Administrators

So I tried FCPX in the end and glad I did because it transcodes MJPEG 4K at real-time speed (24fps) to ProRes (various flavours) on my iMac and the quality is perfect. Some quite amazing magic sauce going on with this. Resolve is giving me 7fps and FCPX can even edit / playback MJPEG 4K from the 1D C flawlessly on my Macbook Pro Retina 15" whereas Premiere can't (and has the banding).

I won't yet be switching NLE but going to explore Compressor as my transcoding app for the 1D C.

The FCPX interface has NO batch export for clips, you can only do them one at a time or bunch them all into one clip on a timeline export... pretty stupid!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The FCPX interface has NO batch export for clips, you can only do them one at a time or bunch them all into one clip on a timeline export... pretty stupid!!

​Compressor is meant to add export presets and destinations to FCP X, very similar to AME. Proceed as follows (translated from german, terms may differ): Go to >FCP X >Presets >Destination >add destination >Compressor preset. From there you can add any preset, custom or default, you previously defined in Compressor. EDIT: I never batch exported individual clips from FCP X, so I gave a wrong advice first. You are right: Though you can choose multiple clips in the event browser and export them, they will be one clip in the end. So either you need to do the batch export in Compressor or try Larry Jordans workaround ...

But what were you planning to do with those transcoded MJPEG files? Reimport them? Why? You could better have a ProRes4444 or HQ preset for the project (=sequence), then Resolve will do the high quality rendering for you as a final step. Disable the default background rendering in FCP X, if you want to render specific sections of the timeline - clips with Neat applied won't play in realtime for example - you can any time select them in the timeline and hit ctrl+r.

Take your time to get accustomed to the magnetic timeline. It's a pita first if you come from a track based NLE, but once you stop trying useless workarounds, you will never look back. Don't fight the magnetic timeline.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It also looks like QuickTime Player is altering the gamma of mjpeg files to 1.8 or something close vs Premiere, AE and Nuke (sRGB). I looked to see if there were any hackable files in Premiere and all the import files seem to be compiled. Various containers didn't avoid the problem. Doesn't seem to be a rec709/601 legal or scaling issue. I say that because the slate test shows the values out of studio swing (shows full range in source test). Since this is an issue with Premiere and AE, I don't think you're likely to get a fix any time soon. Importing a Premiere project into AE also didn't remove banding with 8bit or 16bit render to tiff. As was tested, rendering from Premiere also bakes in the banding, although I didn't test the higher bit depth render options, didn't think that would matter. Additionally, Premiere still seems to have virtually no file import options, import LUT, transform matrix, or CDL support. Anyway, a fast lossless codec option is Animation (qtrle) 8bit RGB (or 24bit per pixel), although not as friendly on slower systems. You can do it from ffmpeg like so:

ffmpeg -i mympegfile.mov -c:v qtrle -r 24 -pix_fmt rgb24 muchbetterinpremiere.mov

I'm surprised Premiere is still so limited. 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

  • EOSHD Pro Color 5 for All Sony cameras
    EOSHD C-LOG and Film Profiles for All Canon DSLRs
    EOSHD Dynamic Range Enhancer for H.264/H.265
×
×
  • Create New...