Motion 5 Banding

I have spent hours testing and reading manuals, posts in forums and whatnot to find and issue to the problem of banding when rendering certain compositions in Motion 5.
I am appalled to see that this problem endures through versions while it is fondamental to the application. Hey, it's what comes out of the blooding thing that is at stake. It is what makes the software shines. Much more than the "professionnal interface" or the processing power of the thing. Rendering crap at top speed is no achievement.
Look around. People reporting the problem abound. And nothing is being done by Apple.
Should we take this as one more proof that image professionals are a hopelessly dying breed in Apple's pool of customers?
In its current state, this product is useless. You can try and see if it does the job if you can afford the time, and if it doesnt then do what other suggests since there is no cure (unless you consider adding noise a cure), that is using After Effects.
Am I missing something? Has a miracle happenned while I was looking through posts from last year to find a solution (the recent ones quote the old ones).
Zague

The sole fact that you wish me good luck in my attempt to get Apple's attention says it all, Russ.
I will leave a feedback in the Apple Store, when I find the time. In general, I think it could be more efficient to be public about the problem that has survived through versions than telling it, probably for the nth time, to Apple itself.
They don't even bother to fix the preview of documents produced by the software. What they put instead is a purple slate that says "Media Missing in Motion File x" (which, obviously, is not true most of the time). It's been like that since the software was released. It is somewhat puzzling that they put so much effort on design and let that kind of sloppy shortcoming endure.
Zague

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Gradient Banding in Motion

I have a gradient issue with a square I created in Motion 3.0.1. I enlarged the shape to 260% and blurred it to get a really soft gradient with an opacity at 18% or so in 3D space. My problem is that it's got banding around it really bad. I generally always get banding in Motion. Could this be my graphics card?
It only supports 16 bit not 32 float!?! Would this make a BIG difference if I upgraded my machine with a card that supported that. I have a second gen. Dual 2.0 G5 with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro card. Thanks in advance.

A new card is not gonna help - I've got a 1900 and I still get banding on a soft monochromatic gradient... Could be the LCD. Reduce banding adds noise to an image, but sometimes you have to crank it up above 1, try 5 or 6 and see what happens.
I think we're dealing with 8 bit display technology.
As to your other questions, check my profile...
Patrick

Banding in animated motion background

Hi. I exported a 6 sec. motion background from After Effects as a pict sequence, brought the sequence onto the timeline of FCE, animated the color balance settings, re-exported the sequence from FCE as a QuickTime movie and burned it to a DVD (using iDVD). Viewing the DVD on a television monitor shows noticeable banding of tones in the higher contrast areas of the motion background. Is there anything I can do to lessen or avoid altogether this effect? I think I'm doing my exports at highest quality but maybe there's a setting or two I'm not aware of that will give me greater color depth or whatever it is I need to maintain smooth, continuous tones. Also: I work w/ animation a lot and often export my pict sequence from the FCE timeline as a QuickTime movie and then bring the QuickTime movie back onto the timeline and replace the pict sequence because the QT movie is easier to work w/ and doesn't require re-rendering. I do notice a slight loss in sharpness between the original pict sequence and the exported QT movie but I quess there's no way around this? Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.
Stopmotion

A couple of warnings.
First, when you work in FCE you can avoid burning a DVD to check the final quality of your movie: connect your Mac to an interlaced TV through firewire and a D/A converter and select the external Apple Firewire device in View/Video Out (most DV camcorders may also work as converter). What you see in the canvas, or in the QT player (after exporting from FCE) may be better or worse than the picture you'll see in the TV, but the quality you'll see in the connected TV will be basically the same as from playing the final DVD.
Second, FCE native formats are either DV or HDV (AIC), so some degradation in quality cannot be avoided when you import a pict sequence.
This degradation may get worse and worse the more you export from FCE, process in QT, and import back to FCE. You should reduce this cycle to the very minimum or avoid it altogether. While using Export/QuickTime Movie should not degrade quality at all, probably you cannot do without Export/Using QuickTime Conversion if you need to export a pict sequence for processing in Quicktime.
This might not solve your problem, but I hope it can help you in any case.
Piero
Message was edited by: PieroF

Horizontal bands during motion

I recently began working with HD. My clips were filmed in HD and imported into FCE-HD as HD. I exported these clips as a quick time format for iDVD. When playing the movie in iDVD there are thin horizontal bands that show up when the camera or subject is moving. Is there a better way to deal with converting HD to SD? I dont have a HD burner yet!

I have the same issue...does anyone have an explanation for this? I edited and exported from fce. When I burn in iDVD, the movie has horizontal bars that blur and look like the motion is dragging in stripes. AAAAAAhhhhhh! What am I doing wrong?

Can rendering from Motion reduce banding on gradients in graphics?

I have created a 50-minute animated movie, the visuals all rendered from Flash Professional 8 in the Animation codec. They look stunning. Clean & beautiful with no banding or artifacts of any kind.
I edited the movie in FCP 4 using the DV sequence preset and output as DV NTSC. The finished product is mostly gorgeous but has some colour halos and noticeable banding in the gradients I would like to eliminate.
Question is: If I bought Motion (FCStudio), could I import the whole project into Motion and output it with float rendering would that eliminate the halos and banding? The source files are currently animation codec but could all be re-rendered as uncompressed 10 bit if necessary.
Or is there some other way to deal with banding in gradients and colour halos?
G5 dual 1.8Ghz Mac OS X (10.3.9)

I'm sure impressed with all the responses. Thank you.
As my original question had to do with buying Motion for the float rendering, I didn't give you enough detail to solve my problem in Flash & FCP4.
At least half of the gradients are in the foreground and the 3d renders, so compositing over a background won't help. I have tried all the high rez codecs and had the same problem. Sorry about wasting your time.
I have found an acceptable solution that might be worth noting.
The problem was in rendering it as a self-contained movie from FCP4. I had overlooked the CUSTOM setting under Export as QuickTIme which allowed me to ouput a REFERENCE MOVIE in ANIMATION codec ( I had previously tried outputting a reference movie in uncompressed 8&10bit but that made the actual real life DV footage in the movie terribly jittery).
The reference animation codec movie burned to DVD eliminated a lot of the banding and reduced the rest to a level that looks like a "style". The output is otherwise stunning in its clarity and colour, and for this project I am deeming that acceptable. I will buy FCP Studio and learn Motion and perhaps output an even cleaner master in future but not for this deadline.
Thank you all again for taking the time to reply.
G5 dual 1.8Ghz Mac OS X (10.3.9)

How to avoid or get rid of digital 'banding' when slow motion is used.

how can i avoid or get rid of those ugly digital 'bandings' when i slow down a hd video?
thx
pieter

Hi ..
Reset the device:
Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button together for at least ten seconds, until the Apple logo appears.
If that doesn't help, tap Settings > Safari then tap to clear History, Cookies, and Data then restart your iPhone.
No data is lost due to a reset.

FCP and Motion formatting issues with DVCPro 50?

The material is DVCPro 50 NTSC 48khtz. (Item properties indicate that I initially digitized it properly.) My sequence settings are DV50 NTSC 48khtz.
I wanted to create a vignette effect so I exported my clips as a Quicktime (current settings) sequence to Motion. When I was done there I exported the sequence from Motion back to FCP as a DV NTSC movie.
Some of the Motion effected clips will play, look great and then all the sudden I see a black band appear on the East side of the frame. I can stretch it in Motion some but it just degrades the image so I'd rather not.
I'm surely grateful if someone can steer me in the right direction here.

Thanks for the workflow tips and suggestions. I backtracked to my original sequence and found the problem originates there. I have narrow black lines on both sides of all these clips. Since I resized a few clips with moves, I didn't recognize the problem. Now that I'm closer the root of it, any suggestions?
By the way, these problematic clips are intercut with no problem library footage that was also shot on DVCPro 50 and I took in on the same deck.
I cruised the forum for any occurence of a similiar issue and most replies seem to suggest a formatting issue. I don't get it since I think I have everything set up correctly. As a precaution, I also tossed out my preferences using FCP Rescue 5.
Welcome to the discussions, splotch.
Not sure what is causing this, but I might propose an
alternate workflow. Have your clips on the timeline
as you wish, ctrl/right click on them and select
Send To Motion.... Click the
embedded and open Motion ticks, give it a name, then
continue. Do your work in Motion, save, quit, and
fall back into FCP. Your clips may lose their
"anamorphicness" on their round trip, but just
ctrl/right click on the clip and select Item Properties/Format..., then
click on the anamorphic button.
Try this and see if you are still getting the same
problem...
Patrick

Can't drag motion files into Compressor anymore

I used to be able to drag Motion files into the batch window in Compressor, and now I can't. I've tried trashing preferences - no effect. It's frustrating because loss of this ability doesn't coincide with any update, so I'm not sure what it could be. Does anyone with more compressor experience than me have any ideas?

Somehow, when I tried to drag from the finder, I didn't always get the right song! But if I double clicked that song in the finder, the right song was played by iTunes, even though the wrong song showed up in Garage Band. Dragging to and from the desktop worked fine, and I just dragged it from the desktop to the trash after I worked on it in Garage Band for editing and "sharing" back into iTunes.

Setting up the correct custom project size size for keynote presentation in FCP 7 or motion?

Hi...anyone else do this?
I have been creating and editing films in FCP (not X) for years now and have got into creating the whole presentation for clients awards ceremonies etc. via Keynote on my iPad via HDMI to HD projectors and it looks amazing and is seamless on the night. No need for crappy powerpoint slides and jumping to low res DVD films - its all controlled via my iPad.
But i want to up the creativity of the presentations - at the moment we import the films as mp4 HD QT files and jpegs of the speakers/nominees/titles screens etc. created in Photoshop and put the whole thing together in Keynote on my iPad. It worked a treat and my clients love it!
Now i had a thought and did a test and created Motion graphics versions of the speakers titles and nominees screens in Apple Motion - so that they had an animated section at the start with whoosh audio stingers as they are played and not just stills - and then export them as QT files - import to FCP 7 timeline and export to compresser ready to convert to mp4 for Keynote.
This way i can extend the static part of the screen after the motion graphic part to say 10 mins as i never know how long the speaker will be on stage.
Then when the speaker moves on the next item i can hit the ipad which will move to the next presentaion screen!
Q. Now ive been doing these as HD 16:9 screens - but when imported to Keynote I have a white band top and bottom on the screen so i really need to start with a template screen size of 1024 x 768 for Keynote and also keep this size in FCP 7! And also export to Quicktime as the same size.
When i do static jpegs to import into Keynote i just define the pixel canvas size - 1024 x 768 @ 300dpi in Photoshop and it works fine but im not sure what to do in Motion or PCP as I have always created my films in 16:9 HD widescreen preset!
Anyone else doing this and got a solution to my problem and can help with custom project sizes in motion and FCP 7!

1024x768 is 4x3. 2048x1536 is 4x3. Both of these are current display dimensions for iPads 1-3.
HD video (1920x1080 or 1280x720) is a 16x9 aspect ratio.
Try putting a rectangle in a square. Unless you scale the retangle up and lose image on the sides you will not be able to properly fill the entire 4x3 display area. The easy compromise is letterboxing to ensure all of the rectangle is display in the square. The iPad is doing this with very little effort on your part.
In FC you can create a new sequence and go into the settings and customize it to 1024x768, 2048x1536 or
just about any other dimension. Even If you create a custom sequence at 1024 or 2048 in FC you will see the same results that the iPad is giving you with much less effort, render and conversion time (presuming your keynote workspace cannot change in dimensions or aspect ratio and you are unwilling to crop your 16x9 aspect ratio video to fill the space.)

Motion 5, 16bit and Gradients problems

I got a lot of problems with gradients in my last project.
I did orange gradient in Motion 5 for background, rendered it to ProRes 4444 and got banding and other gradient problems. Same time rendering to TIFF sequence was fine. Then I imported this TIFFs to Motion 4, change project to 16bit mode, enable float render in rendering preferencres. Rendered to same ProRes 4444 and all things are fine& No any banding.
In other hand I got information from manual that Motion 5 always work in 16bit mode. But my test show that output is have problems with right wripping 16bit video to any codec.
Can somebody conform this problems and may be somebody finded any solutions . . .

I can confirm this problem. I've created FCPX templates that look absolutely perfect in FCPX until they are rendered and there is banding in every version of ProRes. I know this problem is specific to Motion and Final Cut as *other programs* have no problem exporting/rendering flawless gradients in at least ProRes LT.

Rendering issue (banding)

I'm rendering a short quicktime (700 frames) and its a fairly simple scene with a tiff of a drawing that is being illuminated by a spot light with a fall off. When I render out even at "Best" quality I'm getting some banding in the falloff. Is there any way to render out 16 or 32 bit from Motion 3? It looks great in the canvas, but the quicktime looks crummy. Any ideas?

Nevermind. FYI, it was an issue with the DV codec. I exported again with the quicktime compression set to "None" and it looks correct.

How to create the perfect gradient in motion

Hi does anyone know how to create a gradient background in motion without it banding in the final movie ?
Paul

Hillster wrote:
What is Floating Point?
Floating point math. Open your project properties (CMD+J) and change the bit depth to 16 or 32 bit float. It'll cause a tremendous slowdown of playback, but presumably you should just be able to leave it off until you're ready to export.
Also, use the best compression you can afford to. Uncompressed, Animation (maybe), or even a TIFF sequence. The less you're compressing the file, the better it'll look.
Andy

Increase the length of a motion 5 template?

I'm a total Newbie in Motion (which come to think of it...would make a great band name ). Anyway...I purchased a motion 5 template with some drop zones and all that good stuff. It looks great and the client loves it. The problem is that it's 22 seconds and it needs to be 30. I've been searching everywhere to find out how to stretch the whole thing out 8 seconds, but the only thing I can find is a mac break video done about 3 years ago by grouping and cloning layers. I've tried that but I can't get it to work. Can someone point me in the right direction?

use ArrayList or StringBuffer or String Builder class.
or
use ArrayList to get the input at run time and use toArray() method to change the list to array.
there is no option available to change the size of the array once created.
there is no Arraysutils package , it is util.Arrays.
u import,
import java.util.*;
or
import static java.util.Arrays.*;

Mavericks: disable rubber band scroll bouncing

Now that I have to use Mavericks every day in the office, the insipid rubber band scroll bouncing is simply maddening.
It's distracting, annoying, useless and a constant drain on focus.
Please, for the love of cute puppies, does anyone know how to turn this off?
Sadly, defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberBanding -int 0 has no effect in Mavericks, while it did before in previous OSes.
Honestly, just a setting to turn off all the sliding, popping, jumping, darting, swooping graphics and cascading NSOutlineViews would make me actually enjoy using the Mac again.
I want to get work done, not get distracted by excess motion all over my screen.
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

I have tried multiple terminal commands as well. It worked for Chrome, but my Mail messages are driving me nuts bouncing all over the place! There must be way to turn this off!
Just tried Tinker Tools which is supposed to remove bounce in all apps (except Safari) and it didn't work for Mail either. It's almost unuseable this way unless I want a headache after reading 5 messages. Stupid Apple.

PDF dropped into Motion problem

I created some graphic text in Illustrator, using the Extrude/Bevel effect, and saved it as an .ai file. Then I dropped the graphic into Motion. In Motion the image remains sharp even when large on the screen. The problem (and I wish I could attach a file to show it instead of describing it, but here it goes) is that in the curved areas of the text, in the smooth gradient blend in the extruded part of the text, there are horizontal lines going from the face to the back of the text. These lines appear to be banding from the blending steps, but they look smooth in Illustrator.
Any ideas? Has anyone successfully brought text extruded in Illustrator into Motion? Motion's Extrude Filter seems a little fuzzy, so I'd prefer not to use it. Seems to rasterize the graphic when it applies the filter.

Thank you. I had fixed resolution off. The image looked very sharp, even when enlarged. But, the lines (which are sharp) are in the curved parts of the gradiant. I Changed the bit resolution to 32-bit (it was 8-bit), but that didn't make a difference.
I tried this experiment: Instead of bringing the .ai into Motion and letting Motion convert it to a PDF, I rasterized the graphic in Illustrator first, then saved it as a PDF with 1200 dpi. This worked getting rid of the lines and the image looked very sharp when enlarged in Motion. BUT, the file size is 97 MB (compared to 1 MB) and the graphic gets unsmooth when it is smaller on the screen. So, this is not really a solution.
I'm guessing the problem has something to do with Motion's .ai to PDF conversion? The original in Illustrator has very mild, exceptable banding (to my eye), but when brought into Motion the bands become this sharp, thin, black lines.

Motion 5 Banding

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