Avoid Colour Banding when Exporting in H.264

[Yiannis241183008gur]

I'm trying to export a video which needs to be less than 10MB so it needs to be in a H.264/MP4 format as opposed to a MOV. Through research i know that to get rid of banding you need to set the render depth to 16bt, however the H.264 format is limited to 8bt. What would be the best way of converting/exporting to an MP4 whilst avoiding banding and having a high quality look.

[Mylenium]

There's no way to avoid banding entirely in H.264 or for that matter in 8 bpc beyond a certain resolution. It#s cold hard computer math. That's just how it is. The proper way to approach this problem is to adapt the design so the banding is disguised by gradients, noise and moving objects. A screenshot might allow people to advise, but otehrwise you just have to accept the fact that it will never look perfect when using a compressed CoDec.

Mylenium

[Yiannis241183008gur]

Thanks for the reply!

Here is a frame from the video, how would you suggest diguising it out of interest? In terms of the animation, the chest fall and lands into that position, and then it cracks open slightly.

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

Yeah, pretty much exactly what I thought. 70% of your frame is static content and this will be a pain to compress. Unless you can change the design so the background is a gradient instead of a solid this will neever change. All the tricks in the world can't save this one. If this is for integration in another project or a web site it would be more efficient to crop it only to the actual region where the chest falls and then re-create the rest of the background in the web code or whatever. Similarly, there's a good chance this could even be optimized to a PNG sequence or animated GIF and that, too, would come in at less than 10 MB, give or take a bit of cropping as well.

Mylenium