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color banding in renders
I posted this question on a Cinema 4D forum, but haven’t had much luck with answers. I’m noticing that when I render out multi-pass animations, and then try and fine tune those layers in After Effects, that I’m having color depth issues. If I take a specular layer (for instance) and try to really bump up the white levels, it starts to band very badly, right away. I’ve checked every place I can in C4D, and it seems that I have all my render settings as high-quality as possible. Of note, I NEVER have this problem when rendering out animations from Electric Image.
Please help!
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6 Replies
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Are you rendering to 16 bit color depth?
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I’m pretty sure that I am. I’m not in front of my Cinema 4D computer at the moment. What other options might affect the output quality? Are there any dithering or color blending options? Also, are there any added options I should be concerned with when I do a multi-pass output? Are some file formats better than others?
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[doug nash] “I’m pretty sure that I am. I’m not in front of my Cinema 4D computer at the moment. What other options might affect the output quality? Are there any dithering or color blending options? Also, are there any added options I should be concerned with when I do a multi-pass output? Are some file formats better than others?”
Hmm, you shouldn’t have banding with 16 bit files. Otherwise, you should check the “24 bit dithering” box in render settings which can reduce banding. As far as formats go, any uncompressed format that supports 16 bit files should be fine. I pretty much always use either .tiff or .psd.
If you still have the problem after checking all of the above, you might try creating a layer with a very fine noise and overlay it on top of your other layers. That will usually kill most banding and shouldn’t be noticeable at appropriate settings.
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Thanks for that extra info. You know, I think I’ve been using Quicktime here and there, so that would probably account for some of this, as I don’t think QT can support 16bit, right?
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Either way, I never have this problem when I go from Electric Image to AE. Never. Any EIAS & C4D users out there who can compare and contrast?
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32-bit is the solution. I’m rendering out PSD sequences, and at that color depth, they look great in AE, even when highly tweaked!
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