I'd be more inclined to assertain first if the banding is real or not. Many LCDs display horrid banding on gradients that are definately not in the source material.

Bob.

We tried numerous things to get vegas projects into Avid and Vegas's EDL export didn't work. We worked a long time on it and from our research we deduced that Vegas speaks only with Vegas when it comes to video projects.... Don't even waste your time.

bruce... was this the EDL export from file-->save as or the EDL export from scripting?

I helped finish a project in Vegas that was meant to go to Pro Tools and had problems with AAF transfer of the project. After all the AAF protocols were checked we tried sending it to Avid as an intermediate step. Still a no-go. Finally, the Avid guru at the post-house told us that, in his experience ,"Unfortunately, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." Our post-audio engineer had to rebuild ADR and Foley timings from scratch in Pro Tools.

Thanks for everyone's input, this may take a while because me running this newly purchased Media Composer is, for now, a lot like the passenger who tries to land an airliner when the pilots pass out. "Well, Tower, I've landed a plane many times on my computer." (P.S. I can't believe Avid MC does not have a secondary color corrector.) The tools are similar enough, though, that it's largely a matter of getting used to not having certain drag and drop tools at the ready. Trying Avid doesn't affect your craft or technique, just your tools. (Though in fairness, the Script Sync feature is amazing for those who want to line a script with their NLE.)

Will try the scripting EDL and wonder if rather than capture from the tapes, since I originally saved the .veg file with the "copy media with project" setting, can I point MC to the avi files that Vegas renamed and copied to the hard drive?

Same experience trying to output AAF arrangements to a Pro Tools sound designer on this film. Didn't work. Ended up rendering a Quicktime file with both timecode and the script's scene numbers burned in, using a cue sheet I typed myself, and separately rendered files of each cut of dialogue, room tone, FX, walla and music, all on a portable hard drive. (P.S. on getting the designer's work back, all as .aif files, I still was able to smooth out the work, eliminate a few Pro Tools-created glitches, and added better noise reduction (with NR2.0), and a little more dynamics in Sound Forge 8.)

Re: banding I thought, reflecting on Glenn's advice, that I might render from the timeline just to YUV uncompressed files and then tinker with them in MC (as well as Vegas).

Film was shot 2:3 and not 2:3:3:2, and similar banding showed on both a big-screen TV and a 19-inch Sony Trinitron 'Wega.' Bear in mind the banding that concerned me is only in two instances: a Particle Illusion 2,0 smoke effect at the start of the film, and on several Secondary Color Corrector selections after smoothing them as much as possible. I believe some of the banding effect is more pronounced just from rendering to MPEG-2.

Finally, in case anyone's wondering, aside from the sophisticated color correction functions in Avid MC, I immediately began to gravitate back to Vegas 8 which is in comparison, ridiculously simple to use.
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That might be even worse. 8-bit RGB --> 8-bit Y'CbCr --> 8-bit RGB would introduce more rounding error than just 8-bit RGB--> 8-bit RGB.

since I originally saved the .veg file with the "copy media with project" setting, can I point MC to the avi files that Vegas renamed and copied to the hard drive?
Let us know if that works. (My knee jerk reaction is that it probably won't.)