Exporting colour issues after effects

[chrish20073666]

My colours and quality are dropping when exporting it to h.264. How can I match what I see in Media Encoder/AE as best possible when exporting??

I also get a huge amount of banding, where if I export as .mov it's perfect but I need an mp4.

I'm using sRGB IEC61996-2.1 for my working space and 16 bits per channel depth. Latest AE and ME.

I would appreciate any help!

Thank you 

[Dave_LaRonde · Accepted solution]

Don't use the H.264 codec -- it throws away a LOT of color information.  Choose another codec.  File sizes will get much larger, gbut if the color is crucial to you, it can't be avoided.

[Mylenium]

You need to educate yourself on what CoDecs and formats can actually do. There is no point to even work in 16bit when the intended output is an 8bit format that uses chroma undersampling and limited color ranges. It's that old thing of intermediate formats for production vs. formats for final output/ delivery. Likewise, there is little to no point adhering to designs that work against how those compressed formats work. your "black hole" and skinny text design is a perfect example of what exactly not to do when using H.264 and such. there simply is no way to accomodate the limited color range without causing banding just as there is no way to retain perfect thin lines in a block-based compression scheme such as used by any MPEG-based formats. Again, you seriously need to study up and then modify your design as well as exploring your options for output.

Mylenium