5x5, Things I do in a day

[txcrew]

I made my first 5x5 vignette with the GH1 (1080 24p/kit lens/iso 100/ 1/50 shutter) and tried out Magic Bullet Looks also for the first time in AE.

http://vimeo.com/5585792

Aside from a little bit of noise on a few shots (some of which I was able to correct in AE) I feel pretty good about the footage. You can see what I'm trying to describe in the attached image.

Can anyone tell me what this is, causes it and/or how to avoid it?

TIA,
txcrew

[Martti Ekstrand]

That looks like a nice day. :)


Can anyone tell me what this is, causes it and/or how to avoid it?

That's the AVCHD encoding in conjunction with 8 bit colour space. There are some colour nuances that fall through the cracks quite literally with MPEG4 coding schemes as AVCHD (just like MPEG2 btw). There simply not enough steps in 8 bit so it has to pick nearest possible nuance. Compare to making gifs for a extreme example. I see it especially in deep oranges like you show, deep blues and faint mid gamma low saturated mauves/purples.

Since you have AE there are numerous ways you can fix it there. For a start try a adjustment layer set to 'Color' blending mode and experiment with small blurs to break the edges. Then a very common post method for tricking 8 bit output to avoid blocking and banding is adding film grain on material with smooth gradients., be it footage or generated ramps.

Just bear in mind is that once you let Vimeo re-encode it to their 8 bit Flash version of h.264 it'll probably be back again but as I said, some grain can help.

[txcrew]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Your comparison to a lower bit rate gif really made sense.

I will try the AE suggestion and see how that goes.

Is there anything I can/should be doing optically in camera? Perhaps, just try to avoid shooting those types of colors?

Thanks again for the tips!

[PappasArts]

100iso is a challenge on 8bit codecs. Shooting at 400iso will introduce a wee amount a of noise that will dither that before 8bit encoding! Also Neoscence 8bit to 10bit conversion is a possibility!

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