Quality issues with render (especially with text)

[Chris Wright]

Do a quick test with a single image render.
Select Tiff, Trillions+, LZW off
It should remove the banding and fix the text. A lot of codecs are only 8 bit millions :/
Also make sure you’re running at least 16bpc and are not using 8 bit plugins.

https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/

[Josh Pigford]

Single image render based on those settings does indeed look fine. I also switched to 16bpc and tried rendering as Lossless again…but the same issues are still persisting.

What codec do you suggest for exporting the actual movie (instead of just one frame)?

[Josh Pigford]

No, I’m specifically referring to QuickTime Player. I’m not using FCP for anything at this point in the project. And no interlacing.

[Chris Wright]

any 10bit or higher 4:4:4 codec that support trillions+ of colors. I recommend cineform 4:4:4 or ProRes 4444, both are good. Also, you can render out image sequences then burn them into mpeg’s if your software supports it or just settle for adding noise or slight blurs to video. Search the cow for “banding” for more detailed instructions.

https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/

[Josh Pigford]

What’s not making much sense to me is that even if I set the compression codec to “None” and just render it as a regular QuickTime file…it still has this same problem.

The only way that seems to avoid the problem is to render as a TIFF sequence with trillions of colors…which creates prohibitively large files (7GB+ for a 10 second clip).

[Josh Pigford]

The more I look at this, the less I think it’s a banding issue.

If I remove all effects/gradients/etc and just have a white background with a single solid color line of text, it’s still “soft” around the edges of the text when I render with Best Settings, Lossless.