Banding with 3d lights

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Try adding a small amount of noise to the blue channel of the image in question. This normally helps to stop the banding.

Roland Kahlenberg
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Anthony Dupsta]

Thanks for the suggestion.
The Banding is a global problem. Adding noise and channel blur does break up the banding but the character now has sploches instead of banding. So I am not sure what is less of the two evils. Anyone know of another way to deal with the lights banding. Is this a known problem? Any help is greatly appreciated.
dupsta

[Goldman]

For adding noise:
I have used a plug-in from

[Anthony Dupsta]

Thanks again,
As of now since there isnt many solutions expect for adding noise which will be just as much of a distraction I have to turn the option of expecting lights off on charachters that are banding and color correct them to match. Tons of extra work. Again, the bit depth helps a little but isnt the solution and the feather also doesnt seem to make a difference. I have tried many varibles before aborting my lights. Reading throught the post it seems that no one really knows what to do with this but add noise. Thanks, any one know if adobe would address this?

[Steve Roberts]

Unfortunately, beyond adding noise, or going to 16 bit and rendering to 10bit, there really isn’t a solution other than changing the composition elements around, and here’s why:

At 8-bits-per-channel, if you have a gradient from white to black that spans 256 pixels, you won’t see banding because each pixel has a discrete colour value: 256 levels of gray within 256 pixels. There still is banding, but you don’t see it because each band is one pixel wide.

Now if you make that gradient span 1024 pixels, you’ll see banding, because you’ll have 256 levels over 1024 pixels. That means that each level of gray (band) now has to be four pixels thick. (1024/256=4) The solutions are to add noise and break up the banding visually, or to go to 16-bits-per-channel so your gradient has 32,000 levels to work with. No banding.

However, we don’t enjoy most of the benefits of 16-bpc unless we render to a 10-bpc codec and avoid 8-bpc in the pipeline, laying off to Digibeta at the end. Sometimes we can get away with working in 16-bpc then rendering to 8-bpc (e.g. Avid) at the end, but your project may push the envelope too far.

Does that make sense?

[Anthony Dupsta]

Thank you for your time and energy. I appreciate your thoughts.
I do see the break down and limited range.
Bit frusterating to have to abandon all this work and lighting setups.

[Anthony Dupsta]

Thank you for your time and energy. I appreciate your thoughts.
I do see the break down and limited range.
Bit frusterating to have to abandon all this work and lighting setups.

[Spencer Tweed]

The best thing I have found to do is to set your project to 16bpc and apply the ‘Dither’ transition to the layer that has banding (or to an adjustment layer) and set the ‘Transition Completion’ to about 93%-95% (delete the key frames).

You can also play with layering dither and Gaussian Blurs (not Fast Blur).

Best = Spencer

PS
If anyone has a better way that doesn’t involve several hundred dollar plug-ins please let me know, banding is by far my worst enemy.