Why does this footage look wrong?

[Foggy]

Hi folks,


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGYwF46k2aw&feature=youtu.be (apologies for the 10 seconds of black at the beginning)
I've been gathering showreel footage recently by going around local institutions and filming people doing what they enjoy doing the most.

I got this great footage of a young pastor praying but it has really annoying banding on it.

It was shot in RAW on a BMPCC with the whole scene being lit by an amaran LED panel and a couple of smaller LED rim lights. 25FPS 180 degree shutter. Processed in resolve 11 then exported from resolve as Prores HQ.

I like it as a small showreel piece as its an interesting image but the banding is so distracting, so where have I gone wrong?

Cheers!

 

[Will Vincent]

It looks like there's a fair amount of digital noise, also might be seeing some horizontal banding that looks a bit like the Fixed Pattern Noise that people complain about with Black Magic cameras, but that's much less noticeable than the fuzzy noise most prominent by the talents right ear/cheek.

What kind of processing did you do? Did you push the image really far with resolve? My first thought is that it wasn't properly exposed so when you pulled levels up you revealed a bunch of noise, but without more info about what you did for post processing it's difficult to say for sure.

 

[Foggy]

It got a lot noisier when I applied one of the kodak LUTs, I did push the image a long way yes. It was slightly under exposed in camera as it was a live prayer meeting that I didn't want to throw a massive light on, maybe I should go back and film it again with more light.

 

[Will Vincent]

The kodak lut is probably adding a ton of contrast, which is accentuating noise that's already there from pushing it too far.

Are you using the full version of resolve or resolve lite? Wondering whether or not you are able to use resolve's noise reduction on it.

Alternatively you might want to try neatvideo to do noise reduction.

The noise seems to be fairly uniform across the full image, so it does kind of read like film grain. You could use that to your advantage, add a 16mm film grain to it to hide the noise, and make it an 'artistic choice'

 

[Foggy]

Resolve lite sadly,ill have a look into neat video.

The LUT was actually a kodak film LUT so from my understanding should add grain anyway. I like the footage, it was actually shot with cropping to 2.39:1 in mind but I figure if I letterbox it the rest of my reel will have to be like that too so currently undecided.

I like the footage and the overall contrasty look, the idea is that theres two sides to him,he described his praying as channeling jesus and allowing jesus into his spirit hence why I lit him half and half.

 

[Nikola Damov]

Why don't you tell him to pray for your footage to look better lol.


Reduce the contrast. Make it more saturated. It'll look way better.

 

[Will Vincent]

A LUT won't add grain on its own, it'll simply mimic the color curve of film stock. Unless you were using something like "filmconvert" which applies a lut and grain.

But you can think of a LUT as basically a spreadsheet. It literally stands for "Look Up Table" and works by transforming values from input to their mapped output values.