Gradient Banding

[Stephen Smith]

How About: Effects, Video Filters, Image Control, Reduce Banding. Best of luck.

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[Jerry Hofmann]

Banding is more prevalent in 8 bit video. ProRes is 10 bit so that’s why it looks better… still has a bit, but it’s much better than 8 bit.

There isn’t a real work around for this, other than what was suggested. If that isn’t good enough, might try blurring the gradient a bit, but it won’t look as good as the ProRes version would.

Jerry

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[John Pale]

Note also that your display card and monitor can introduce banding not in the actual file if they are not capable of displaying 10 bit info.

[Sven Giebel]

Blurring the gradient won’t help I’m afraid, it will make things worse. Try adding a bit of grain, sometimes this helps.
good luck

[Michal Trzaska]

Gradient Bending is vary annoying, I found it that if you make your gradient in Photoshop and add the noise filter it helps a lot.

If you are in Final cut you will need to do some more work.

To your gradient layer apply a “Add Noise” filter.
You will need to mess around with the settings here a bit.
-Bring down the Amount, I have it at 1.4
-Type: White noise (Uniform) works fine
-Blend mode, I used Overlay
-Autoanimate, Unchecked, we want eh noise not to move
-Mix, if you want even less noise bring down the “opacity” here.

It’s a fine line you want the eliminate the bending of the colors but you want the image to stay crisp.

Hope this helps,
MeHow

Michal Trzaska
Editor, Colorist, Director of Photography, VFX Artist and Motion Graphics Artist
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