[Martin Stacey]

Yeah I’ve found that for HAP just a 5% noise over the top creates the least banding. 16bit reduces it a little further, but doubles the render time, so you’ve got to take that into consideration.

[Martin Stacey]

Yeah, I’m on a 10bit Imac retina, and I get that some of the banding will be caused by the screen.

I tried that with the arithmetic plugin, and although it did a more pleasing dithering it also introduced banding that wasn’t there in the “16 bit millions” render.

with arithmetic plugin:

16 bit project rendered to millions:

Sorry to go on about this, I’m not being awkward, but I just want to make sure something isn’t going wrong here. Banding in grads is something I’m really trying to avoid, so I’m looking for the best solution to get rid of them, and it’s led me to point.
A lot of the time I’m going to a deliver codec like HAP, which is really bad with banding, but it seems much better if I render a 16 bit project down to prores 4444 millions of colours, ’cause it introduces the dithering, which then reduces the banding in the final HAP render too.

[Martin Stacey]

Yeah, it’s not that I think anything is wrong with the codec,
It’s that it seems strange to me, that the best way to get rid of banding is to work in 16 bit, but to render to millions of colours, as opposed to trillions.

So this is the AE Viewer in a 16 bit project:

This is a trillions of colours render which looks the same, which makes sense:

And this is the same project in 16 bit, but rendered to millions of colours:

which in my opinion is way preferable to the AE Viewer or the trillions render because AE is dithering so the banding is much less obvious.
So it seems the way to get the best looking final delivery render would be to work in 16 bit, but to render to 8 bit depth, not 16 bit.

Which seems odd.

[Martin Stacey]

Yeah, it’s more the idea that rendering at a lower bit depth looks way better that I found puzzling.
Also I think I would have noticed this in previous versions if AE if it had been doing it then.

[Martin Stacey]

Ah ok, I get ya.
It just seems weird that to get the best looking gradients you need to render at a lower bit depth. And that also once that file is rendered you can switch to 8bit and this rendered gradient looks much better than when working in 16bit.
If only AE made the dithering function available as a filter it’d solve a lot of banding issues.

[Martin Stacey]

That’s great thanks. I know next to nothing about Xpresso. So if all those cubes were seperate and moving at different speeds and coming past the camera at different points, would I need an Xpresso node for each one? At the moment I’m just animating the visibility by hand.

[Martin Stacey]

Yep, it’s not really talking about trying to create a smooth ramp. I was more asking how after effects is working. Thanks though.

[Martin Stacey]

Ah thanks for the info. Also, is the dithering effect after effects uses available as an actual effect that I can apply manually. I know you mentioned S_Deband but was wondering as it’s already in there if I had access to it.

Thanks

[Martin Stacey]

And why doesn’t it just apply dithering in the first place and make all 8 bit images look like 16 bit?

[Martin Stacey]

Really? Cause I’m still seeing defined lines in 8 bit and 16 bit, but the lines are just much thiner in 16 bit.