I've noticed both in the tutorial video and when I render the animation of the Looping Patterns Blobs myself, there is banding in the rendered out video - is there any way to get rid of the banding? I tried different export settings like "high quality" and "lossless", but I can still see banding. Any tips would be much appreciated, thanks!
Oh yeah, I didn't notice it before! Thanks!
It could be the effect of video compression, but if it is happening to you also...
Maybe the vignette is causing it. Try rendering with the vignette off,
Or try a higher resolution, you can change the resolution percent to 200, you need to click on it and type 200.
Let us know the results, post some images here for comparison.
When ever you see banding it's typically the color depth that is causing it, so not enough color information. Try rendering at 16bits or 32 bit float. The PNG's format can go up to 16bits and Open EXR can go the full float 32bts. Files will be a lot heavier in megabytes though, but you'll get much more quality images without the banding.
On your color ramp change it from B-Spline to Ease. You will probably need to adjust the markers a little. You can also increase the detail of the noise texture. I believe 15 is max.
Thanks for the tips! Unfortunately the banding still appears in all the exported renders using H264. The PNG and EXR stills themselves look good with the 16 bit or 32 bit color depth, it is only when they are exported as videos. Found this article on banding and found that Apple ProRes 422 codec plus a Premiere noise grain filter yielded the best results with the PNG 16 bit files. Hope the info helps someone else!
That is indeed a common problem, more so when working with gradients mmagtek. I have to fight that daily with my motion graphics work.
Usually the first things we do to counter that are indeed rendering with higher bits per channel and increasing detail. Next you can add some granular noise on top of everything, at the compositing stage. A tiny bit goes a long way (in After Effects where I normally do that at the end of every project I can sometimes get away with as little as 1%). For some crazy gradients that don't cooperate very easily you can also layer two separate instances of tiny amounts of noise.
There are also free plugins for that kind of banding and flicker removal if you use any other NLEs: https://digitalanarchy.com/demos/psd_mac.html#d9
Then, as you noticed it: mp4 is the enemy of quality, so if you can get away with it use ProRes or .avi
And last, but not least, as soon as you have the crisper and most beautiful gradients with no banding and upload it to Youtube it will be ruined again (less if you did do all of the other steps). The level of compression they have, and most social channels for that matter, is quite heavy. I'd say Vimeo and Wistia as the best player options for quality, but just remember that none of them are perfect.
