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Banding in FCP 7 with Mountain Lion ...

Anyone know of a fix?

While the programs still work fine, one fundamental change that Apple has made in Mountain Lion is to push more of the responsibility for displaying the image on the computer monitor to the GPU of the graphics card. Previously these responsibilities were shared with the CPU. Therefore, if you have an older graphics card (even if it is fully compatible with FCPX, as ours are), FCP6/7 has a difficult time playing back 1080 video in the Canvas window (at any size), without breaking up when there is some degree of movement in the video image.The screen cannot refresh quickly enough to draw the video image without showing horizontal banding and some minor digital garbage.

Rest assured that the render files are clean and the output file will be fine. Once exported, a self-contained .mov file will playback fine in Quicktime, showing no banding where there previously was banding when viewed in FCP. This is an issue with display only. If you can live with it, fine. But it is rather distracting while editing.

Can someone please address or advise??? I've tried on my brand new, just before they discontiued, 17 inch MacBook Pro as well and same EXACT issue.

Of course I can down grade to Snow Leopard, but are there any other workarounds? Like changing graphics card?

8-Core 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon MacPro, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Aug 30, 2012 9:13 PM

100 replies

Oct 18, 2012 12:10 PM in response to Christopher Sims

usually those cards are on ebay if you cant find one.

might be newer ones that work well, but I am not sure about that.

this card was recommended to me highly & i have had no issues over the past year with it.

got mine on ebay as well.

to confirm I do not see this tearing or banding with pans & movement - using ProRes standard, ProRes HQ, XDCAM, and 10 bit uncompressed SD NTSC footage in different projects right now.

Oct 18, 2012 12:20 PM in response to Jason Britski

Great! Thanks for your feedback man. I see a number of these GTX cards on eBay. Ordering now and I'll see what happens.

Oct 18, 2012 12:54 PM in response to Christopher Sims

forgot to mention it is GeForce GTX 285 for Mac & not the PC version

Oct 18, 2012 12:55 PM in response to Jason Britski

Yes of course ... got it. Mac version is ordered and on the way.

Oct 18, 2012 1:08 PM in response to Christopher Sims

good luck

Oct 19, 2012 3:31 PM in response to Jason Britski

Just installed ... experiencing same exact issue. Seems a little better than with the 5870 card but banding is definately still there. I wonder if it's my display? I have an old 30 inch Cinema Display from Apple. What display are you running?

Oct 19, 2012 11:33 PM in response to Christopher Sims

unless I missed something earlier in this thread, why not get a video io card like an aja or blackmagic card and monitor on a real video monitor if the banding while editing is bothering you? The BM Intesnity Pro is only abou $200.00 and works great.

Oct 20, 2012 9:03 AM in response to Christopher Sims

2 cheap Acer monitors & a Sony HDTV connected to the matrox mini

not getting the banding for any of the above

when you talked to Apple & they confirmed this was known to them did they give any specifics as to what the main issue was? ie. graphics card, etc?

Oct 20, 2012 10:26 AM in response to Jason Britski

Michael ... I dont edit in that way. Never have. Been cutting for over a decade on computer monitors then doing final viewing on external monitors.

Jason ... Apple said that FCP 7 is not officially compatible with Mountain Lion, only FCPX is. The FCP tech stated that banding is most likely a graphics card/system issue. He said that Mountain's code must display graphics differently than in Lion or Snow Leopard, since both 10.6 and 10.7 are fine.

I've tried 5 graphics cards so far. All do not fix the issue. So I dont even think the graphics card is the issue. I just think its software. Maybe I have some weird kernal that Jason doesnt have or my machine is a little older and the board translates graphics differently. My machine is the 3,1 tower.

I think the best bet is to just migrate back to Lion somehow. Thanks guys!

Hirapuri

Level 1

16 points

Oct 22, 2012 4:13 AM in response to Christopher Sims

Hi,

I have exactly the same issue in 10.8.2 / FCP 6.0.6 / Radeon 5770.

Would be great if this could be solved.

By the way - in other forums it is obvious that really a lot of users are experiencing this problem.

Oct 22, 2012 11:26 AM in response to Hirapuri

So, it's starting to look like Mac OS X Lion 10.7 may be the newest OS that Final Cut Studio can run as expected under. I suppose we all knew this day was coming.

What's that web site for fundraising? Kickstarter? I wonder if we FCP 6 and 7 users who have no desire to switch to anything else could raise enough cash to hire some coders to make what would have been FCP 8?

That, or learn to edit with our eyes closed. (That's supposed to be funny, but why is it bringing a tear to my eye?).

-Warren

Oct 22, 2012 10:26 PM in response to Christopher Sims

I have this problem too on my MacBook Pro Retina. I've just been dealing with it so far (not to mention the fact that FCP doesn't and will never take advantage of the retina display) but it's really frustrating. I'll be keeping my eye out for a solution.

Oct 23, 2012 12:25 AM in response to behindTHEscenes5

Just bought and installed the modded GTX 570 card from macvidcards on eBay ... still slight banding but this is the best card yet. VERY tight and snappy.

LINK:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nvidia-GTX-570-for-Apple-Mac-Pro-2-5-GB-CUDA-DUAL-DVI-Ve rsion-Adobe-Premiere-570-/330810021602?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item4d05d056e2

Also, been researching a bit on http://netkas.org ... I wonder if there is a tech GURU on that forum who can help us editor guys on 10.8.2 running FCP 7? I'll try to poke around.

Oct 26, 2012 11:45 AM in response to Christopher Sims

Here is a good article explaining this exact issue in WIKI ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing

Screen tearing is a visual artifact in video display where a display device shows information from two or more frames in a single screen draw.^[1]

The artifact occurs when the video feed to the device isn't in sync with the display's refresh. This can be due to non-matching refresh rates—in which case the tear line moves as the phase difference changes (with speed proportional to difference of frame rates). It can also occur simply from lack of sync between two equal frame rates, in which case the tear line is at a fixed location that corresponds to the phase difference. During video motion, screen tearing creates a torn look as edges of objects (such as a wall or a tree) fail to line up.

Tearing can occur with most common display technologies and video cards, and is most noticeable in horizontally-moving visuals, such as in slow camera pans in a movie, or classic side-scrolling video games.

Nov 1, 2012 3:13 PM in response to Christopher Sims

After all the changes to video cards I went back to the Radeon 5770. It just works the best out of all the cards I tried. I had strange flicker issues with some cards and some lag stutter problems with playback on other cards.

With the 5770 I still get the banding but I've got to deal with it at this point.

I think I might try to load FCP 7 on a new tower in one of the stores and see if there is banding there ... could be interesting.

Banding in FCP 7 with Mountain Lion ...