Copy link to clipboard
Copied
LUT processing in After Effects now has the option to use a more precise calculation method called Tetrahedral interpolation. The result is smoother gradients and better-looking results when applying LUTs. The old method is called Trilinear and is still available. This option can be found in the Project Settings.
Below is an extreme example for illustrative purposes:
ORIGINAL:
Your basic ramp . . .
TRILINEAR (old method):
Notice the severe banding. This occurs when you have smooth gradients and the LUT doesn’t have enough precision to handle the small steps. In practical terms, outdoor shots with a blue sky are a good example of smooth gradients that you see often.
TETRAHEDRAL (new method):
Notice the smooth gradient. Tetrahedral uses a superior method to interpolate values in between the steps, so even with a low precision LUT, you get very good results.
Tetrahedral LUT interpolation requires GPU processing and is a little bit more computationally intensive, but we don’t think it will be noticeable. Let us know if you see performance degradation.
We want to know what you think. Please join the conversation below.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
It looks like this option is grayed out for me in After Effects v24.4.0. Any idea why that would be?
I'm running AE on Windows 11.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Any chance you've turned off GPU processing?
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Not sure how that got turned off, but it was off indeed. Thank you! Problem solved.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Hi @VictoriaNece ,
Stumbling upon this recent post and like to ask. Could we have a mechanism in place that keeps the user choice fixed? Sometimes AE force switches Mercury engine to software only if a project is very heavy, but in doing so it also sets the LUT interpolation to Trilinear. This is not restored back to Tetrahedral when changing the playback engine back to GPU afaik. Would be nice if that's remembered. Or even better Tetrahedral would always be the option and also function on the CPU? Not sure if there is a reason it can't...