Banding in render?

[Walter Soyka]

The animation codec is 8-bit.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[James Woods]

can you make a recommendation?

[Kevin Camp]

10-bit uncompressed would be better. Digital anarchy used to have a free codec called none16 that was an uncompressed 16bit codec, but it seems to have disappeared since red giant bought most of their effects and codec.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[James Woods]

none 16 sounds good, why doesn’t AE come with something like this? and why id none 16 gone. nonsense

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

You can always render tga sequences or uncompressed Tiff.
For compression to a delivery codec bring the sequence back in AE, open the AE comp in Adobe Media Encoder and compress from there. MPEG2 is still the one codec that does not give banding, but I had luck in certain situations with h264, if I setup key frames for every frame.
flv or f4v work sometimes as well.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Walter Soyka]

Which format and codec you use is really dependent on the next step in your workflow, but you could preserve bit depth by using any format and codec combination that allows you to choose Trillions of colors in the output module.

In addition to the other suggestions from Kevin and Tudor, you could render to a few other image sequence formats: DPX, OpenEXR, PNG, and PSD. I’dd add here that TGA is 8-bit only (it’s up to 32 bits per pixel, not per channel).

You could use compressed 10-bit YUV (sic) QuickTime codecs like ProRes or DNxHD.

For higher depth RGB video, you could use Apple’s ProRes 4444, or AJA’s or BMD’s 10-bit RGB codecs.

For 8-bit deliverables, you can try the old trick of adding noise to your gradients to reduce banding.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[James Woods]

thanks everyone

[Marcos Ganan]

This is the reason for which I have left the editing in FCP and now I use PremierePro. Banded blur and gradients. Nothing to do, in my case, with Uncompressed 10, nor Prores 4444 and so. The solution for my has been format DPX (sequence), with which the platform of Adobe works perfectly and fast and smoothly. No bands in final renders for MPEG2 BluRay and others HD codecs.

Poor english…

[Darby Edelen]

[Walter Soyka] “For 8-bit deliverables, you can try the old trick of adding noise to your gradients to reduce banding.”

Side note: if you are working in 16bpc in AE and render to an 8bpc codec then AE should add dithering automatically.

Obviously that wasn’t enough in this case though 🙂 Were you using the Lossless Output Module?

Darby Edelen