How do i fix this fuzzy ant looking stuff in premiere

Hello,

Sorry for the issue, but it has little to do with Premiere Pro. This is what we call gradient "banding" from working on footage with areas of heavy contrast. The reason for banding could be that the footage containing high contrast gradients was shot in 8 bit H.264 and then exported to H.264.

A fix is to shoot at higher quality or to add light to the areas containing such dramatic areas of contrast.

The most common issue people have regarding these artifacts is with the sky, which is often filled with different colors of blue, so gradient banding occurs frequently in that case with lower quality footage. The other common issue is that there is not enough light in the scene. Night scenes shot on cell phones contain a lot of this artifacting, as you may have noticed.

Sometimes, you can lessen the intensity of the issue by making the gradients less extreme via improved lighting or adjusting exposure on the camera (for example, a high ISO setting can produce artifacts such as this, too).

To sum up: if you are shooting in heavily compressed 8 bit H.264 and exporting H.264 (also heavily compressed) and have extreme gradients, you're seeing the result.

If you want to use heavy gradients in your program (and who can blame you, they look great), then your source footage needs to be from a pro video camera that can acquire footage in a high quality format, not in 8 bit H.264 (which is, unfortunately, very common in DSLRs, mirrorless cameras, consumer level camcorders, and mobile devices) but in 10 bit ProRes - if possible. Then, export in 10 bit color space export (ProRes HQ) to avoid noise and banding issues when exporting.

BTW. you can upload ProRes files to YouTube. They just take a lot longer. A good alternative is to create a ProRes master and then make copies from that master in Media Encoder.

If you cannot work in 10 bit and must shoot in 8 bit, try the VR De-Noise effect at .02 or thereabouts. Not working? Purchase the Neat Video Denoise effect. Then, export with ProRes or ProRes HQ.

Note, it won't be perfect. Too much denoise and your footage will be too soft. Find a happy medium, and good luck. Come back with any questions.

Thanks,
Kevin