colour banding

hi, does anyone have a tip on how best to get rid of colour banding.
i have scaled up a clip perhaps 300 times so just a tiny portion of it fills the screen, not only this but i have also slowed the clip right down to maybe 4 percent.
so now the colour looks very banded (don't know if this is the right term) where you can see the colour gradiants too obviously, there is no subtlety to the image, not surprisingly.
is there any way to improve the image now so that the colour is flatter, less gradiant, more solid colour?
hope this makes some sorta sense

> i have scaled up a clip perhaps 300 times so just a tiny portion of it fills the
> screen

You probably mean your scale is at 300 per cent -- you've blown it up three times. It's not possible to apply a 300-time blowup (30000 per cent) in Final Cut -- 1000 per cent (10 times) is the highest you can go.

Usually you can only blow up an image to around 130 per cent before the image breaks up. Three hundred per cent is too much, especially if you're dealing with an SD format.

thats exactly what i mean, its at 300 per cent

You can't infintely zoom into a television picture. Motion video may look wonderful, but the basic television camera is the rough equivalent of a one-third megapixel still camera. That and if you're playing these tricks with DV, the color channels are even worse. Much worse.

I think you're experiencing the problems of having too few pixels chasing too many inches of screen area.

The people who assume you can get movie posters out of a screen still capture run into the same problem. About the best still you can print from a video grab is 5x7.

Sooner or later you'll have to actually shoot the video you want instead of creating it in post.

Koz

hi,
unfortunately it was a question of money, i.e. quality of camera, and being in the right place at the right time.
oh dear, this isn't looking very promising, i can use what i have, it just looks a bit wishy washy

You could make it look like a creative effect... Like adding CSI style grid or scanlines over the top? This might help to disguise the awful scaling.





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thanks Ben, i'll give it a try

You might want to experiment with the color smoothing filter. Or apply a very mild blur.



- Justin Barham -