Banding problem in MPEGII but not Quicktime

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Try rendering out to uncompressed format (tiff, targa, png), then use something like Adobe Media Encoder to compress to MPEG2.
Using 16 bit or 32 bit for the initial comp may help also.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Jim Dodson]

If that doesn’t work, here’s a great tutorial on the subject of banding over at Grey Scale Gorilla …

https://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2009/10/how-to-remove-banding-artifacts-in-after-effects/

Jim Dodson

8 Core Intel — Mac – OSX

[Kazumi Hatori]

It’s kind of weird that the high bitrate MPEG-II is so much different from the “look-okay” Quicktime movie.

Though, I tried to double the noise amplitude,
and the MPEG-II looks fine without banding, but slightly noise.
This is so far I can come up with, but I still wonder
how do Professional guys output a clean color gradient on broadcasting?
MPEG-II isn’t a way?

[Walter Soyka]

[Kazumi Hatori] “It’s kind of weird that the high bitrate MPEG-II is so much different from the “look-okay” Quicktime movie.Though, I tried to double the noise amplitude,
and the MPEG-II looks fine without banding, but slightly noise.
This is so far I can come up with, but I still wonder
how do Professional guys output a clean color gradient on broadcasting?
MPEG-II isn’t a way?”

How are you compressing your MPEG-2? What bitrate? It sounds like you’re using Compressor, which, in my opinion, uses a lousy MPEG-2 encoder.

There’s a Compression techniques forum here on the COW which might also be helpful for you.

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

[Kazumi Hatori]

oh my god I’ve been thinking compressor would be the way to most kind of compressing.

I did it in compressor by chosing Program Stream,
bitrate to 34 Mbps, and tried to turn frame control ON.

Because I’m having the short film to be digitally screened in house, that it’s the specification they gave me and MPEG-II is the only format they accept.
What way can I have a better MPEG-II output other than compressor?

[Walter Soyka]

[Kazumi Hatori] “I did it in compressor by chosing Program Stream,
bitrate to 34 Mbps, and tried to turn frame control ON”

No need to use Frame Controls unless you are changing the frame size or frame rate.

[Kazumi Hatori] “What way can I have a better MPEG-II output other than compressor?”

There are several other compression applications, including Telestream Episode, Sorenson Squeeze, and Adobe Media Encoder. They all produce different MPEG-2 encodes, and perhaps you would prefer one of these.

That said, adding a little noise to gradients is important to prevent banding, because it forces the compressor to allocate more bits to that area of the image (thus increasing quality) than it would otherwise.

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

[Kazumi Hatori]

I guess I will try with adobe first…
and different noise settings.

Thanks Walter!