Tag Archives: monitoring

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HELP! There is banding in my footage – or is there?

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I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth bringing up again as I keep coming across people that are convinced there is a banding issue with their camera or their footage. Most commonly they have shot a clear blue sky or a plain wall and when they start to edit or grade their content they see banding in the footage.

Most of the cameras on the market today have good quality 10 bit codecs and there is no reason why you should ever see banding in a 10 bit recording, it’s actually fairly uncommon in 8 bit recordings unless they are very compressed or a lot of noise reduction has been used.

So – why are these people seeing banding in their footage? 

99% of the time it is because of their monitoring. 

Don’t be at all surprised if you see banding in footage if you view the content on a computer monitor or other monitor connected via a computers own HDMI port or a graphics card HDMI port. When monitoring this way it is very, very common to see banding that isn’t really there. If this is what you are using there will be no way to be sure whether any banding you see is real or not (about the only exception to this is the screen of the new M1 laptops). There are so many level translations between the colourspace and bit depth of the source video files, the computer desktop, the HDMI output and the monitors setup that banding is often introduced somewhere in the chain. Very often the source clips will be 10 bit YCbCr, the computer might be using a 16 bit or 24 bit colour mode and then the  HDMI might only be 8 bit RGB. Plus the gamma of the monitor may be badly matched and the monitor itself of unknown quality.

For a true assessment of whether footage has banding or not you want a proper, good quality video monitor connected via a proper video card such as a Blackmagic Decklink card or a device such as a BlackMagic UltraStudio product. When using a proper video card (not a graphics card) you bypass all the computer processing and go straight from the source content to the correct output. This way you will go from the 10 bit YCbCr direct to a 10 bit YCbCr output so there won’t be extra conversion and translation stages adding phantom artefacts to your footage.

If you are seeing banding, to try to understand whether the banding you are seeing is in the original footage or not try this: Take the footage into your grading software, using a paused (still) frame enlarge the clip so that the area with banding fills the monitor and note exactly where the edges of the bands are. Then slowly change the contrast of the clip. If the position of the edges of the bands moves, they are not in the original footage and something else is causing them. If they do not move, then they are baked in to the original material.

A7, Alpha1, FX3, FX6, PXW-FS5, PXW-FX9

Understanding Sony’s Viewfinder Display Gamma assist.

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Most of sony’s cameras that support S-Log3 or Hybrid Log Gamma also have a function called Viewfinder Display Gamma Assist.

Viewfinder Display Gamma Assist allows you to monitor with the cameras built in LCD screen or viewfinder with the correct brightness and contrast range when using gamma curves that are not directly compatible with these Rec-709 screens.

Whenever you try to view a gamma curve that is not normal Rec-709 on a Rec-709 screen the brightness and contrast that you will see will be incorrect. The most common scenario is perhaps viewing S-Log3 without any form of LUT. In this case the images will look less bright and have less contrast than they should and this makes judging exposure difficult as well making it less easy to see focus errors.

With a camera like the FX6 or FX9 most people will use the cameras CineEI mode and add a LUT to the viewfinder image to convert the S-Log3 to something that looks more contrasty and on the FX6 and FX9 the default LUT is “s709”.  However s709 is not the same thing as Rec-709 (Note that with the FX6, because LUTs are always available in the CineEI mode, viewfinder display gamma assist is not available in the CineEI mode of the FX6, you should instead use a LUT).

I think a lot of people think that the default s709 LUT is the same as Rec-709, it’s not, it is very different. They look very different and result in quite different brightness levels when exposed correctly. s709 when exposed correctly will put skin tones somewhere around 50-60% and white at 78%. If you expose s709 using normal Rec-709 brightness levels (70% skintones, 90% white) this is actually over exposed by just over 1 stop. As a result if you expose the s709 LUT, using Rec-709 levels, and then turn off the LUT and instead use Viewfinder Gamma Assist, the gamma assist will look wrong, it will be too bright and may look washed out and this is simply because the exposure IS wrong.

Almost always, if the viewfinder display gamma assist looks wrong, the exposure is wrong. When it looks right, the likelihood is the exposure is right.

A few things to understand:
  • The viewfinder is a Rec-709 range display device only capable of showing Rec-709 range and colour.
  • Feed true Rec-709 to a Rec-709 device and you will have a correct looking image with “normal” brightness, contrast and colour.
  • Feed S-Log3 to a Rec-709 device and you will have an incorrect dull, flat looking image due to the gamma miss-match between the capture gamma and display gamma.
  • Feed S-Log3 to a device with S-Log3 gamma and you will once again have the correct brightness and contrast as there is no longer a gamma miss-match (S-Log3 only appears to be flat due to the gamma missmatch between S-Log3 and Rec-709, use the right gamma and you will see that it is not actually flat).

Viewfinder Display Gamma Assist works by changing the gamma curve used in the Viewfinder to a gamma curve similar to S-Log3. When you view S-Log3 with a monitor with S-Log3 gamma you will have the correct contrast and brightness, so correct exposure will look correct.

But because the cameras LCD display screen can only show 6 to 7 stops you don’t get the full S-Log3 viewing range, just the central mid range part that is the direct equivalent of Rec-709. This very closely matches what you see if you use the Sony 709(800) LUT to convert the S-log3 to 709. The 709(800) LUT converts S-Log2 or S-Log3 to vanilla Rec-709 (70% skintones/90% white) with a knee that provides a slightly extended highlight range. It is broadly comparable to how most conventional Rec-709 cameras will look. So as a result viewfinder display gamma assist and Sony’s 709(800) LUT’s will look almost identical, while the s709 LUT will (and should by design) look different.


Viewfinder Display Gamma Assist is extremely useful for scenarios where you do not have a LUT option such as when shooting in CineEI in HD with the FX9. It can help you make good exposure assessments. It can make it easier to see when you are in focus. But it isn’t a LUT, so can’t be applied to the cameras outputs, only the built in viewfinder. Additionally if you use zebras, the waveform or histogram, gamma assist has no effect on these so you must remember that you are still measuring the levels of the actual recording gamma, not Rec-709 levels.

Viewfinder Gamma Assist is useful not only for shooting with S-Log but also when shooting using HLG (Hybrid Log Gamma). HLG is an HDR gamma curve and because the LCD viewfinder isn’t HDR you can’t correctly monitor HLG directly. Viewfinder Gamma Assist allows you to monitor with the correct brightness and contrast when shooting HLG making it easier to confidently get the correct exposure levels, as much like S-log3 the levels required for the correct exposure of HLG are quite different to Rec-709.

One last thing: NEVER use Viewfinder Gamma Assist with a LUT at the same time, this will result in a completely incorrect looking image and could result in very bad exposure as a result.