Why can’t I make this look right?

[Merlin Vandenbossche]

Johan,

What you could do is add grain to only the background layer in AE, using the ‘add grain’ effect. If you lower the ‘intensity’ to something like 0,200-0,300 ; the grain will hardly be noticeable but it will help better preserve the color gradients in the final render of this clip. If you have used the ‘generate – gradient ramp’ effect to create the background gradient, you can also combine the above grain with an increase in ‘Ramp Scatter’ to 300+.

A combination of this has always helped me avoid banding in the past. Rendering in Animation codec should be fine. ProRes 444 or 422 (HQ) should also suffice.

Good luck!
Merlin

[Johan Windh]

Thanks for the advice, Merlin.

Ofcourse, I haven’t tried 4444.. But I’ll give the grain a go too, tomorrow. I just don’t understand why Premiere represents it so good, and it comes out not so.

Kind Regards,

Johan

[Mike Jackson]

The advice you got above is solid. But the basic reason you’re getting banding is that you’re exporting to codecs with lower color space (10-bit 422 specifically, going down from your 32-bit RGB original). That introduces banding.

You don’t see the banding during Premiere playback, because it’s playing your original file, in all its 32-bit glory. It doesn’t re-compress it until export.

Adding the subtle grain to create ‘dithering’ is your safest bet, since almost no commercial broadcasting / web delivery formats support anything higher than 10-bit color (and most are 8-bit). So even a ProRes 444 export is going to get banding by the final stage of delivery.

[Johan Windh]

Thanks for clarifying, Mike.

But I thought it was a bit strange that I got the banding on some formats, even though I changed the settings to 32-bit. eg. QT-animation.

Kind Regards,

Johan