My thoughts on "banding"

A

Andrew J. Allsbury

Well-known member
Hello All,

Recently we have been shooting interviews with a ton of colored walls and flare lighting. As you know this makes pretty hard core gradients which should result in banding from the af100. Personally as long as its not obnoxious I tend to look the other way on this issue because most viewers are used to seeing this often in web compression and on their computer monitors. However, we finished our shoot last week, took a look at the footy on our computer monitor and damn...there was a tiny bit of banding. So we looked at it on our 720p studio monitor...didn't see it anymore...then on a brand spanking new Panasonic 1080p plasma...no banding. All in all I checked it on 4 TVs and studio monitors and saw ZERO banding. But on all three computer monitors we viewed it on, there was a tiny amount.

I'm not saying it's not there and I'm not saying it is there. I'm just saying it's interesting. :thumbsup:
 
On my first test shoot, I saw it straight out of the camera into a Pana pro plasma, but then didn't see it when viewing through Final Cut/Kona onto a Sony PVM production monitor. Interesting indeed.
 
Andrew J. Allsbury said:
I'm not saying it's not there and I'm not saying it is there. I'm just saying it's interesting. :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

It is interesting and my observations are the same as yours. On studio monitors, on professional monitors, on plasmas the footage looks great. On computers... not so good.

That is a good thing though. I think we, or the industry needs to figure out how to resolve this problem. It is similar to issues we had before with Mac gammas and computer monitors stretching blacks which created noise.

There really needs to be some kind of standardized system put into place because everything ends up on the web and it would be comforting to know it gets up as intended.
 
I saw some banding on something I put up on Vimeo. I checked that same file (AVC mp4) and it did not show up on my monitor (Dell U2711). I thought it was just a function of the compression done on the site. I've been keeping my eye out for it but I don't see it at the camera which came as a relief!
 
I wanted to point out that displays, just like cameras, can be 8 bit or 10 bit color.
Good 10 bit color displays are usually very expensive. We bought a 10 bit 24" TVLogic with dual link for $12K.
 
Yeah, 6-bit displays are definitely going to show banding. A lot of cheaper computer monitors fall into this category. The quality of the MPEG decoder in the computer can affect this too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top