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


Andrew Reid
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Offtopic but how do you cut a 25 track music video on fcpx? Is fcpx workable when doing something complex?

​Yes, but you really know how to work with its features instead of just working around them, which is what a lot of new users often do, which then turns them away from it. It's organizational features are pretty amazing. There are still things that need to be improved, but it is an overall enjoyable editing experience for me.

 

Andrew- instead of batch exporting, I imagine you could just import the MJPEG files into FCPX and select the transcode option. Once it's done, you can just pull the files out of the 'transcoded media' folder for use in premiere or wherever. Or is there something else I'm missing?

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Perhaps try ticking the maximum bit depth option at export, it processes the video in float point. If you untick it it will be processed in 8 bit space.

When editing, timeline video tends to play back at draft banding and scaling unless you tick max quality and max bit depth in sequence settings, which could be the cause.

You may find that such things aren't on your exports if you use maximum settings, even if they appear in the timeline draft mode. Certainly I have no such problems.

Many After Effects users complain of banding in their animations, until they realise they need to render in something other than 8-bit for the engine! It's often missed by users.

 

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max2.PNG

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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. 

 

 

​The quicktime player one there looks like the standard quicktime gamma bump to me.

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Perhaps try ticking the maximum bit depth option at export, it processes the video in float point. If you untick it it will be processed in 8 bit space.

When editing, timeline video tends to play back at draft banding and scaling unless you tick max quality and max bit depth in sequence settings, which could be the cause.

You may find that such things aren't on your exports if you use maximum settings, even if they appear in the timeline draft mode. Certainly I have no such problems.

Many After Effects users complain of banding in their animations, until they realise they need to render in something other than 8-bit for the engine! It's often missed by users.

 

max.PNG

max2.PNG

​I tested importing a Premiere project into AE and rendering the mjpeg clip as an uncompressed tiff sequence from within an 8bit and 16bit project, thinking maybe that would be a workaround, but the banding was still re-baked into the file. Although this banding was a little different, not an identical match to the render test from Premiere. I didn't test rendering float from Premiere after the 16bit AE test though, or check the video preview box, I looked for something like that but couldn't find it.

Can someone please post a link to a source file that they believe Premiere has a problem with? Since no one has yet posted any export settings or sequence settings (why?), I would like to rule out user error. One file is enough...

​Renders were tested early on by Andrew and I also tested in Premiere and AE, but as discussed above, I have not tested rendering float with the settings above for Premiere, only tested 8bit render and also used default video preview settings in Premiere. If you want to play around with it, you can use this slate:

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

 

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A little more information on this:

The scanline on the right side was not part of the slate, it was applied to the rendered gradients in compositing to test the gamma and make sure it didn't change. It appears that editing in Premiere, with settings at max quality max bit depth made no difference in the render (I'm using CS6 though), but importing a Premiere project into After Effects, setting the comp in AE to 16bit, then rendering at minimum "Trillions of Colors" comes closer the top interpolation in nuke of Y'CbCrA 444 (rec601) to display RGB (AE 32bit didn't make a noticeable difference). This might allow skipping transcoding and still using Premiere for editing of mjpeg files, if quality is deemed good enough. Importing into AE with 8bit project settings but 16bit output doesn't improve the banding on render, you have to set the project to 16+. Also, color space in AE was set to none. 

 

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​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?

​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.

​The Aztec Pyramic. I know its not the best timeline workflow for this kind of work. I wish  Adobe give a mode to change it to look like Premier. Still you can have an incredible IQ rendering from AE.

Here i share a link for a video i just uploaded. Download for max quality: https://mega.co.nz/#!kIxzjBQD!-9Zm5zyaReDy04LKSMtt0nFZXGsI_tcKWJHcPqjZoGc

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Wild Ranger:

I would have liked to see your video, but got a browser incompability 'warning'. I was forced to download Firefox, Chrome or Opera - even for download! Refuse to be blackmailed like that. Safari (latest version) supports all modern protocols (Adobe Flash installed manually). Don't fall for that.

You probably made a perfectly graded video. Nonetheless grading in AAE is as comfortable as swimming in glue. Learning Resolve Lite took me 9 hours of watching the Ripple training and a few days exercises. To explain it to a friend just took a little over an hour. A fraction of the time you waste when you grade in old AAE.

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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!!

​It has now I guess, - with this app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQAoqnlTlbg

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Just turn off GPU acceleration, and all your troubles will disappear! I had a similar issue using Adobe Lightroom, and for the life of me I couldn't find what was the issue with all this banding while pushing around my RAW files around a stop. After much trial and error, the GPU acceleration was the issue. I'm sure Adobe may be using lower precision primitives when running through the OpenCL render path and after awhile all those little bits start to add up!.

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Just turn off GPU acceleration, and all your troubles will disappear! I had a similar issue using Adobe Lightroom, and for the life of me I couldn't find what was the issue with all this banding while pushing around my RAW files around a stop. After much trial and error, the GPU acceleration was the issue. I'm sure Adobe may be using lower precision primitives when running through the OpenCL render path and after awhile all those little bits start to add up!.

​Interesting !

Can anyone confirm that for premiere export :) ??

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Just turn off GPU acceleration, and all your troubles will disappear! I had a similar issue using Adobe Lightroom, and for the life of me I couldn't find what was the issue with all this banding while pushing around my RAW files around a stop. After much trial and error, the GPU acceleration was the issue. I'm sure Adobe may be using lower precision primitives when running through the OpenCL render path and after awhile all those little bits start to add up!.

​If it's an OpenCL problem that may explain why i don't seem to have this issue using Cuda on PC.

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​If it's an OpenCL problem that may explain why i don't seem to have this issue using Cuda on PC.

​I bet! I hate to say it, as I'm an OpenCL advocate, but it's either a problem with the OpenCL driver (which would fall on the GPU manufacturers) or its Adobe's implementation of the OpenCL API in premiere that's causing the issue.

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​The Aztec Pyramic. I know its not the best timeline workflow for this kind of work. I wish  Adobe give a mode to change it to look like Premier. Still you can have an incredible IQ rendering from AE.

Here i share a link for a video i just uploaded. Download for max quality: https://mega.co.nz/#!kIxzjBQD!-9Zm5zyaReDy04LKSMtt0nFZXGsI_tcKWJHcPqjZoGc

​I saw your video. Very impressed. But, as I said, it doesn't prove that AAE is a good choice for CC.

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  • 11 months later...
  • 9 months later...

Is anyone finding, with the Sony A7s II, extreme banding in all out of focus areas shooting in log profiles? I'm not sure if it's me, but using any LUT and applying an S-curve or pushing the footage makes it practically un-useable. I've tried Resolve and FCPX and whilst improving the footage slightly it is still there.

C0003.00_23_48_23.Still015.jpg

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3 hours ago, cameraeye said:

Is anyone finding, with the Sony A7s II, extreme banding in all out of focus areas shooting in log profiles? I'm not sure if it's me, but using any LUT and applying an S-curve or pushing the footage makes it practically un-useable. I've tried Resolve and FCPX and whilst improving the footage slightly it is still there.

Log profiles with low bitrate 4:2:0 8bit codecs should only be used when it is really (I mean really) necessary like high contrast scenes. More so with slog2/3 from Sony that is one of the most aggressive log curves out there. Shooting everything in slog with codecs like that is a common mistake that leads to banding and bad tonalities. 

 

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