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Gradient Banding in After Effects
I am currently working on an animated series, created in After Effects, and am in the process of rendering the files for mastering.
The animation is all asset driven, with all of the assets created as vector art in Illustrator. My problem is that when I render out the scenes all of the backgrounds have significant gradient banding. The backgrounds are illustrator files, so vector based the same as the assets. But all of the gradients contain significant banding, while the assets are fine. Has anyone experienced this before when working with Illustrator and After Effects based animations? Any help would be much appreciated. -
3 Replies
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Banding in gradients is a fact of life in an 8 bit world….That said, using a little noise can help to break up the banding.
Mark
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Yes, do what Marc suggests. A bit of noise and render in 16b.
cheers,
rafael -
If you work in 16 bpc (bits-per-channel), it helps to render to a 16 bpc codec or a 10bpc codec.
(note: most people call these 16-bit, 8-bit, or 10-bit, which is cool. 8-bpc is actually 24-bit, and almost nobody works in true 8-bit anymore (yecch), so we can call 8-bpc “8-bit” among friends. 🙂 )
Microcosm makes a 16bpc codec, and you should have 10-bpc uncompressed codecs on your system if you’re on a Mac. Not sure about Windows.
Now if you’re eventually going to an 8-bpc system such as Avid, creating the gradient with a bit of noise in 16-bpc, then rendering to 10-bpc in AE, then rendering again to the Avid Meridien uncompressed codec might be fine, since having the higher bit depth in the process sometimes eases the compression to 8-bpc later.
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