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AME H.264 Export Makes Sky Shots Look Terrible
I have a project in Premiere CS5.5 shot on an HPX-170 in 1080 24pa, and it looks great in Premiere, but once I export certain scenes that involve the sky, I get gray, blocky artifacts.
In the sample video you can see it in the top left-hand corner. Other videos have had it on the top right hand corner as well. The sample was rendered at 2-pass VBR with 10mbps as the target and 12mbps as the maximum, Use Maximum Render Quality and Render at Maximum Depth are both checked. Level is 4.0 and profile is Main. I have tried both High profile, doing 2-pass VBR @ 25mbps, and all kinds of different things, yet the problem is still there. I tried the MPEG-2 Blu-ray preset, and it looks fine. The WMV 1080p preset is slightly better, but does have some random blockiness scattered about in the sky area.
The thing is, this isn’t the first time I’ve shot the sky, and I’ve never seen this before.
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3 Replies
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Strangely, apparently the VLC media player is actually the culprit here.
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Hi Gary,
I watched the video 4 times earlier and saw no issues and was going to suggest maybe the problem was with the player, using WMP here and looks good.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor -
Sounds like banding artifacts to me. I say this without actually seeing the video as I got an error message when I tried to watch it, but that is what it sounds like from your description.
Best solution is to add a light wash of film grain to the clips — you can do this with the Add Grain effect in After Effects, I usually use the Kodak Vision 800T preset with a grain size and intensity of .08, or 1 if there are still banding artifacts afterwards. What this does is fool the compressor into not banding fine gradients (such as skies) in order to cut down filesize — this will result in longer render times and larger files but no banding artifacts.
Cinematographer – Editor – Motion Graphics Artist – Colorist
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